To celebrate the upcoming publication of my short story, “The Record Collector,” I’m finally doing the “post an influential album each day for 10 days” thing that several friends challenged me to do.

7) Alien Lanes, Guided by Voices

I saw Guided by Voices perform live at Grinnell College when they toured behind this record. Elliott Smith opened. I was front row. GBV rocked harder and looked like they had more fun than any band I’d seen at that point.

Alien Lanes is abstract expressionist music, where enjoying the residual evidence of the artists’ working process is essential to the whole experience. GBV had psychedelic-ish lyrics, British Invasion melodies/harmonies, and “college radio” band ambitions that valued art over commercialism. They recorded the material on Alien Lanes on a 4-track, using the cheap technology to create very real, choppy, handcrafted music.

Like GBV-megafan Albert Hammond, Jr., I forget the names of songs on this record—at least partly because it’s such a perfect single-sitting listening album.

Understand, it doesn’t have traditional “flow” where tacks don’t blend seamlessly into one another, or tell some kind of developed coherent story. No, Alien Lanes is a perfect CD-era album where the “throwaway” tracks work as lead-ins to the amazing songs. Somehow, this calls attention to both the weird beauty of the tracks that seem like noise and to the intentionally half-assed soundscapes in the more polished songs.

The band understood this completely, which is I suspect why they made their first “big” video doing two short songs with a sudden transition: “Auditorium/Motor Away.”

It’s hard to pick a favorite from their three-album run of Bee Thousand, Alien Lanes, and Under the Bushes, Under the Stars. This one gets the nod mostly because of that live show in Iowa.