Guided By Voices: Alien Lanes (1994)

Having already rambled on about Guided by Voices' 1994 masterpiece Bee Thousand , I won't add much here: the following year's Alien Lanes simply repeated the formula, mixing some of the most infectious indie pop songs you could ever conjure amidst fistfuls of noisy dross and bare sketches of songs, the weaker tracks -- typically less than a minute, not worth the effort to hit the "skip" button -- making the winners all that much more powerful.

The two releases are really of a piece, both casually ...