#18 - Bee Thousand

#18
Artist: Guided By Voices
Album: Bee Thousand
Year of Release: 1994
Label: Scat

If you've never heard Guided By Voices before go listen to this and their 1995 follow-up Alien Lanes.  Trust me they're both delightful and you won't regret it.  OK.

Way back when I talked about how more often than not I prefer bands' earlier albums.  This may seem like an odd place to bring this up (GBV existed for many years before either of these records, these two were only released a year apart, and I greatly like them both), but I think it's an instructive example.   First of all, it's clear that Bee Thousand has a less polished sound.  Alien Lanes still has plenty of lo-fi influence but as the band's major-label debut it's clearly more meticulously produced than their earlier work.  But this line from the oral history of Alien Lanes is the key:

"Bee Thousand was an accumulation of ideas leading up for years before we put it together. It’s almost a compilation. All the songs for Alien Lanes were recorded specifically for Alien Lanes. We had developed a great deal of confidence. We had a silly swagger, as the song titles themselves can attest."

Through this lens, Bee Thousand represents the before and Alien Lanes the after of a critical inflection point in the band's history.  And all the stuff from before that point has a raw earnestness that you can't easily recreate (there's nothing quite as wistful as "Gold Star for Robot Boy" in their later work).  This of course doesn't always outweigh everything else about what makes records great (ie. songwriting), but for me at least it's an inherent advantage that often tips the scales.