i wanna ask you a question: what is the best song in GBV's Alien Lanes?

I voted for "Game of Pricks" in a Best GBV song poll (back when there weren't limits on poll options) so I voted for my Favorite Tobin Sprout GBV song, "Little Whirl."
I once got an enthused and inquisitive caller at the radio station after playing it. "What was that song?!" Gotta love it.
I don't care what you do anymore.

A Salty Salute is a great opening number, too.

tbh i had no idea before this poll that game of pricks was the obvious choice. gonna vote little whirl just to even it out. xp !

So many I love, but Motor Away.

it always was "as we go up, we go down", i think nowadays it's "little whirl"

closer you are

I love so many of the songs and Game of Pricks is probably the best song here but I gotta give props to Blimps Go 90, such an effortlessly breezy melody with great lyrics.

"Often times I'm reminded
Of the sweet young days
When I poured punch for the franchise
And thus was knighted
Got so excited"

One of my favorite albums, and a pretty much impossible poll to vote on. The songs that deserve to win probably will, so maybe I'll just throw in for "Chicken Blows". I've a soft spot for that pretty, odd little choon.

I am srsly incapable of doing this.

I was a total gbv fanboy in the 90's and went through a prolonged period of trying to create some distance from these records (incl. Bee Thousand and Propeller) for fear they would never justify the ridiculously high esteem I held them in...

Anyway I went back to this and Bee Thousand and Propeller a month or so back and was just completely kind of...overwhelmed...by how fucking amazing these records are. The whole notion of Pollard from this era getting lumped in with other lo-fi acts or even with other melodically adept indie rockers just seems so completely blinkered fifteen years on.

I think Pollard was harnessing real genius here — as opposed to expertise or peak craft or whatever — that he was actually touched with some kind of open-channel thing allowing him to create these perfect self-enclosed and fully formed universes which were only very rarely more art than pop or vice versa.

FWIW as much as I love this record for me the first side of Bee Thousand shatters to pieces just about anything having the misfortune of bumpered listening and I incl. in that estimation hallowed Zeppelin, the mighty Fall, Dylan and maybe even my daughters' laughter.

I voted Motor Away due to it's immediacy when I was first getting into them in the summer before college 12 years ago and my friend made me a GbV cassette and I was literally motoring down an icy street. But it was followed closely by Hit, which was my roommate in college's favorite song (ever).

The Tigerbomb version of "Hunting Knife" is my favourite GBV song ever, but I gotta go with "Salty Salute".

I hate "As We Go Up We Go Down". I got in a teenage fight with a friend who was a GBV hater. Her proof was the flimsiness of the "We see the truth, yeah, it's just a lie" lyric, she thought that if anybody would make a chorus that bad, then any other moment of lyrical resonance must've just been accidental.

My Valuable Hunting Knife

dunno, i love how gloriously dumb "we see the truth yeah" is -- it just sounds soooooo good. xpost

first time i saw them, right when Alien Lanes came out, someone (maybe it was me?) requested "as we go up" and pollard strapped on a guitar for the only time that night and played a (very drunken) solo rendition. was awesome.

btw Owen P., yr "game of pricks" cover was fab.

the most important decision i will make today. and it's "closer you are". the world just stops for those descending chords in the chorus.

tylerw, nice story. "I didn't at first fully understand what was going on, which is to say that we were in fact already recording the song..."

i think 'Motor Away' was the first gbv song i heard

This is a perfect album.

"flimsiness of the "We see the truth, yeah, it's just a lie" lyric, she thought that if anybody would make a chorus that bad..."

OK this is one of many instances where I again feel like I don't understand what makes lyrics good or bad at all, and am completely unable to understand extreme feelings one way or another, making me terrified to try writing any more lyrics myself.

Owen's teenage friend was a moron.

Surprised that there hasn't been a TS: Bee Thousand/Alien Lanes yet.

xp OK this is one of many instances where I again feel like I don't understand what makes lyrics good or bad at all, and am completely unable to understand extreme feelings one way or another, making me terrified to try writing any more lyrics myself.

Well, there's that theory that lyrics themselves are meant to be imperfect, a verbal statement that is best accompanied by music. Not a poem. There's really no way to say one is 'good' or 'bad' outside of evaluating the broader context of the song, delivery, etc.

I mean, if I heard "A Salty Salute" being sung loudly by a bunch of drunk college kids-- and I have heard-- and perhaps have sung myself-- I'd probably think the words were pretty crap.

"Go Up/Down" is really about the 4 second bridge "I speak in monotone", great line in a song I have bad memories of.

My friend was not a moron she was herself a songwriter and her disgust with GBV was strictly professional

Absolutely, but nobody ever seems to address those variables in their criticisms, and they don't break their analysis down enough. Then I'm left sympathizing blankly because I can't understand their point. Part of my problem is that I've never really been interested/barely pay attention to lyrics, and instead study the compositions. I do hate when lyrics lazily just go "I don't know why, I don't know why" or something, so I guess everyone gets set off by certain things.

see, i think that the point is that lyrics *aren't* poetry -- they're meant to be sung! (sorry if that's capt. obvious). Someone in the New Yorker writing "The truth is just a lie" = total duh. But in this partic song, the way that line is sung, so happy, so heartfelt -- it's not a teenagey statement of jaded cynicism, it's more like a total abandonment of .... um something. I've had a couple beers.

these songs are too short

Game of Pricks is obviously the winner.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't My Valuable Hunting Knife considered a bigger hit *at the time* than Game of Pricks? It had the video, and was the first track on Tigerbomb, and everything.

true, and?

Motor Away to me always sounded like The Who circa 66. It is my favorite on this record. Being a midwesterner that saw them a few times, I got to say I like the one before and the album after more though and I was totally into GBV when all of this was coming out new. They were a hell of a lot of fun to drink a lot of beer and see in a bar, they really were. Later on that kind of got a sad melancholia as the band kept turning over and over and it just wasn't the same, but it was fucking great the first few times.

I think GBV would have been killer if they would have had a great melodic lead guitar player to eat up those chord changes and turn some of those two minute dittys into 3 minute popgasms.

Just noting the critical re-evaluation xpost.

wanna fight about it, drew? huh? huh?

oh, you don't. ok.

I think GBV would have been killer if they would have had a great melodic lead guitar player to eat up those chord changes and turn some of those two minute dittys into 3 minute popgasms.
don't really agree -- but this is pretty much the doug gillard era of the band, no?

I dig sad melancholy GBV! My first record of theirs was Isolation Drills, and it still has tons of sentimental value.

I think Game of Pricks is the answer too but I haven't voted yet because I have too many favorites to pick from. I might vote for "Alright," actually, which is one of my fave album closers ever.

"but this is pretty much the doug gillard era of the band,"

For some reason, Pollard went on a big time off streak on his songwriting after "mag earwhig" and when they started trying to record like a regular band. Maybe he had shot his wad, I don't know. That band was really good the first time I saw them, but then it started to kind of slide.

Maybe it's me, I can hear J Mascis solos in some of those earlier GBV songs in my mind and think, that would have sounded pretty dope.

I dig sad melancholy GBV!

totally. isolation drills is my #2 GbV record after B1000.

I think Game of Pricks is the answer too but I haven't voted yet because I have too many favorites to pick from. I might vote for "Alright," actually, which is one of my fave album closers ever.

― drew in baltimore, Tuesday, July 20, 2010 12:01 AM (46 minutes ago)

yes incredible song

Earthquake Glue is an awesome latter day GBV album.

"Little Whirl" over "Game Of Pricks" and "Blimps Go 90"

I think GBV would have been killer if they would have had a great melodic lead guitar player to eat up those chord changes and turn some of those two minute dittys into 3 minute popgasms.

this is basically Isolation Drills, which is a great album

Gillard's guitar playing really got on my nerves after a while

I like how "Hit" was on the Best of Guided By Voices.

i should listen to those TVT-era records again ... I didn't really love them at the time, but i think i was still just buzzing from the "classic era" -- there is probably plenty of good stuff.

"Isolation Drills" is a great album. Don't much like any of the albums that came after it.

isolation drills was basically a second attempt after do the collapse to do a "big rock album production" bit and done much better with much better songs.

(tho do the collapse has Teenage FBI)

... and proper lyrics that meant something

yeah i guess they are pretty straightforward for pollard, some real "divorce" type stuff on that album

Tearjerkers *sniff* ... tho, one of the most moving songs, IMO, is "Privately"... and fuck knows what that's about

I think Isolation Drills works best of the studio albums because it provides a coherent context for the glossy production. By the time I get to the end of that record, I always feel exhausted and punchy from the sheer loudness of it, sort of like being drunk, which I think is the correlative of a lot of the album's lyrical themes. Pollard and Sprout were real geniuses during the lo-fi era at creating an aural context in which all these sketches and fragments could hang together simply and elegantly. I don't think he ever quite managed to hit that balance again after Alien Lanes, though I'm still fascinated by his attempts to get it right. For instance, I love the sound of Under the Bushes Under the Stars even though it never quite clicks with the songwriting, IMO.

The album Isolation Drills reminds me of most is Soundgarden's Badmotorfinger, in terms of how enervating it is to listen to.

lol if ever there was a song written for dulli to sing it is 'mr. superlove'

obv he did a great job with it

the upper crust rule