08 Alien Lanes
Working my way through the GBV back catalogue has, obviously, been a great pleasure, but it brings its challenges from a blogging/reviewing perspective. The albums I've covered so far have been short on duration (lasting, on average, not much more than half an hour) - but whilst this makes 'on-a-loop' listening less time-consuming, this is more than counter-balanced by the sheer volume of songs. For comparison, I've written about 106 GBV songs so far; at the same stage with The Fall, I'd only covered 64 album tracks.
And now, we have an album that does, for the first time, make it past the 40-minute mark (although only by 75 seconds) but contains 28 (!) songs...
The Album
The club is open
I've mentioned in several previous posts that in my pre-conversion 'everything on shuffle' days, many of the more concise tracks left me frustrated. They seemed too fragmentary, unfinished, when taken out of context. I don't want to harp on about this yet again, so let's just say that opening track 'A Salty Salute' is a classic example. Driven by a serenely solid bass line (a little reminiscient of both 'Gigantic' and 'Debaser'), it consists of little more than a couple of short verses and half a chorus, but it sets the scene perfectly. It has a rousing, call to arms feel to it, one that I'm becoming increasingly aware is a bit of a motto or statement of intent for the community: several people welcomed my first post in the Facebook group with variations on 'the club is open.'
As good and striking an introduction as 'Salute' is, it is bettered by half a dozen two-minute-ish utterly exquisite pop classics.
I've picked up from some comments on the Facebook group that 'Game Of Pricks' might suffer a little from over-exposure at the hands of cover merchants; certainly, a quick google suggests that there are dozens and dozens of them. They range from well-meaning but ropey acoustic strums by enthusiastic amateurs to versions by well-established artists such as Jimmy Eat World (whose take on the song below is competent but workmanlike).
Many of them (such as this one) feel the need to steer the song into navel-gazing folk-lite territory. My least favourites were this soporific, overfussy ambient-electronica version and this testosterone-fuelled rawk 'n' roll monstrosity.
I don't know: but whether you do or not, I unashamedly adore it. It's simply a bundle of joy; a melody sent from heaven delivered over a no-nonsense chord progression that somehow marries being comfortably familiar with a sense of scampering mischief. In particular, the descending motif that accompanies 'and I never asked for the truth' conjures an emotional heft quite at odds with its simplicity.
'Little Whirl' is another track that loops a fairly standard set of chords yet manages to wrest every possible ounce of emotion from its basic construction, especially in the way the chorus slides deleriously back into the verse. 'A Good Flying Bird' combines scratchy early Billy Bragg-esque guitar with another of those catchy so-simple-I-can't-believe-nobody-did-it-before melodies to create a punchy tutorial in how to concoct magic in just over a minute. 'Motor Away' and 'My Son Cool' are heady, yearning swirls of possibilities; the insistent, abrasive grind of 'Watch Me Jumpstart' is thrillingly raw.
Knotty intersections
There are another half a dozen songs that are only fractionally below this exceptional standard. 'Strawdogs' is a joyfully abrasive blast of ragged garage pop-punk; 'Closer You Are' is a little smoother but no less urgent, varying the pace with some diversions into more reflective, minor-chord territory.
The simultaneously jaunty yet earnest 'Blimps Go 90' is propelled by a charmingly wobbly, slightly off-key violin. 'My Valuable Hunting Knife' somehow manages to be taut and compact despite the meandering, fuzzy riff. 'As We Go Up, We Go Down' slows things down to a leisurely lope, albeit one with a madly catchy hook.
Album closer 'Alright' makes for an admirably stirring conclusion. Reminiscent of early Teenage Fanclub, it tramps along with a confident swagger, filled with knotty intersections of wandering guitar parts and overlayed with poignant repetition of the title before resolving into a downbeat murk of fractured dialogue and feedback.
The Red Baron
As was the case with Bee Thousand, Alien Lanes is peppered with brief, left-field / experimental fragments that sit comfortably amongst the pop classics. 'Hit' is a masterclass in how to romp through a verse and a chorus in under 30 seconds; the pugnacious, acerbic 'Gold Hick' manages to sound sprawling despite lasting only half a minute and gains an extra mark for rhyming 'coffin' with 'Baron von Richthofen' (plus another bonus point for the fact that the best piece of work I ever produced in junior school was a project about the Red Baron).
'Evil Speakers' is one of those songs that requires quite a few listens to digest: an almost shapless scurry, it feels like it contains more chord changes than some artists manage in their entire career. Like several of GBV's shorter songs, it takes some time to lock into how it works, but it's more than worth the effort.
In typically contrarian fashion, around halfway through the album throws a trio of this type of track at you: 'Cigarette Tricks' (a fleeting blur of galloping reverberation), 'Pimple Zoo' (a snotty punk / glam-rock stomp hybrid) and 'Big Chief Chinese Restaurant' (a fragment of a touching acoustic ballad tossed into a blender with a Sonic Youth outtake).
There's a playful exuberance about much of the album, but it does have a few more earnest moments. 'King And Caroline' is spare and serious, the elastic bass line for once more prominent than the guitar. The solemn 'Striped White Jets' has a stately grandeur that occasionally breaks out into something a little more abandoned. Most intense of all, 'Always Crush Me' is driven by a harsh, stacatto refrain and is relentlessly bleak and urgent.
Quiet, more contemplative moments are less prominent here than was the case with Bee Thousand. The touchingly sentimental 'They're Not Witches' is tinged with bleakness. 'The Ugly Vision' is a hazy, off-kilter ballad, ponderous and hesitant.
Running a horizontal finger up and down the lips
Whilst there isn't a bad song on Alien Lanes, there is a quartet that, for varying reasons, don't quite achieve their potential. I waited patiently for the snoring on 'Ex-Supermodel' to make sense to me, but that's one that never locked in; the grating noise hampers what is an otherwise lovely piece of jagged longing. Likewise the 'underwater' effect on 'Chicken Blows', which sounds rather like that thing we all did as kids, running a horizontal finger up and down the lips whilst speaking for comic effect.
'Auditorium' is admirably belligerent, but the final eponymous refrain falls just a little flat. There's a certain haunting drama to '(I Wanna Be A) Dumbcharger', but it feels just a tiny sluggish, as if somewhere in the recording process someone set a tape a slightly the wrong speed.
Perfect angels will monitor your intentions
Lyrically, there's a shedload of intriguing wordplay (such as 'Post-punk X-Man parked his fork-lift / like a billion stars flickering from the grinder's wheel'). However, given that the average track length is less than 90 seconds, it's not surprising that there's an overall sense of fragments of thought being plucked out and thrown around.
Only a minority of songs have sufficient length and/or clarity to support a reasonably confident interpretation. 'A Good Flying Bird' strikes a nostalgic note ('Many years we spent unpressured... love in times of simple pleasures') similar to 'Hey Hey Spaceman' and 'Hardcore UFO's'. 'Game Of Pricks' is about betrayal ('with knives in the back of me'). 'Motor Away' describes a yearning for freedom ('When you motor away / down the icy streets / you can't lie to yourself / that it's the chance of a lifetime'). 'Ex-Supermodel' is a seedy tale of exploitation. 'My Valuable Hunting Knife' celebrates the optimism of a new relationship ('Days, they will turn into nights / but my valuable hunting knife / it will not rust through the tears / and it will not lose its appeal over years').
The darkest moments have a touch of apocalyptic fervour: 'To seek the blood from precious stones is blasphemy / the perfect angels will monitor your intentions... temptation creeps to you like rapists in the night' '((I Wanna Be A) Dumbcharger'); 'And a man-child will kill them / and a quick procession will follow' ('King and Caroline').
One little niggle: the reference to 'giggling faggots' in 'Hit' is inarguably jarring from a 2024 perspective, but surely this would have also been the case in 1995?
I may have identified a very few minor flaws, but overall Alien Lanes is a remarkable piece of work. There's an impressive audacity about feelling confident enough to offer up 28 compositions, and whilst arguably a couple could have been omitted with detriment, the album never feels bloated or stretched. Once again, the sequencing of the LP is masterful and several of the transitions are perfectly judged (particularly effective examples being 'Evil Speakers' -> 'Watch Me Jumpstart' and 'Auditorium' -> 'Motor Away').
There's not a notable shift in sound or approach between Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes as there was, for example, between Sandbox and Aerial or Propeller and Vampire. However, there is a slight shift in tone: although both qualities are present in both albums, Alien Lanes tilts a little towards to joyful exuberance as opposed to Bee Thousand's darker, sharper introspection. Overall, both are - to get very simplistic - simply fantastic albums. Which makes them very hard to separate - see below.
As was the case with Bee Thousand, pretty much all of it...
- A Salty Salute
- Evil Speakers
- Watch Me Jumpstart
- They're Not Witches
- As We Go Up, We Go Down
- Game Of Pricks
- The Ugly Vision
- A Good Flying Bird
- Cigarette Tricks
- Pimple Zoo
- Big Chief Chinese Restaurant
- Closer You Are
- Motor Away
- Hit
- My Valuable Hunting Knife
- Gold Hick
- King And Caroline
- Striped White Jets
- Blimps Go 90
- Strawdogs
- Little Whirl
- My Son Cool
- Always Crush Me
- Alright
Album rank:
To clarify: when reviewing the albums, I give an 'overall' mark out of ten; I also rate each song and work out the average. The final score is the halfway point between the two.
Now, I don't usually need this calculation to put the albums in order - in general, I can do this quite happily on overall impression alone. I include the score for the purposes of the blog because it can be useful to indicate the 'gaps' between them. For example, with GBV the posts so far show that there was a notable difference in my assessment of Propeller and Bee Thousand compared with the earlier albums.
With Alien Lanes, however, I found it a real challenge to establish where I placed in relation to its predecessor. Having listened to both incessantly over the last few weeks, I found it almost impossible to separate them. So I had to turn to the maths - which gave me a margin, but an incredibly slender one...
1. 9.09 Alien Lanes
2. 9.08 Bee Thousand
3. 8.7 Propeller
4. 7.9 Vampire On Titus
5. 7.6 Self-Inflicted Aerial Nostalgia
6. 7.1 Same Place The Fly Got Smashed
7. 7.0 Sandbox
8. 6.6 Devil Between My Toes
Other News
As I suggested it might in the last post, the gap between reviews has widened slightly again. This is partly because of the sheer number of songs on Alien Lanes, but also because of assorted domestic engagements. For example, helping my 20yo daughter - who recently passed her driving test on the first attempt (proud dad moment!) - to buy her first car, and taking the twins on a seaside holiday:
As I'm not back at work for another couple of weeks, and given the fact that Under the Bushes Under the Stars has nearly as many songs and is around an hour long (!), it may be a couple of weeks before the next instalment...
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