Dusted Reviews
Artist: Guided by Voices Album: Get Out Of My Stations Label: Siltbreeze Review date: Nov. 6, 2003 |
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In the early 1990s, home recording was threatening to kill the music industry. Lo-Fi was a genre and hiss was the punk rock stamp of credibility. Beck, Smog, and The Mountain Goats were some of the period's heroes whose magic was only enhanced by the hum and clicks of the tape recorder. Most of the music was made by bedroom-songsmiths recording by any means necessary, but one band rose up through the medium and one release seems to be the bridge to their rise.
Siltbreeze Records released Guided By Voices’ Get Out Of My Stations in 1993. GBV had already been on the scene for seven years when this 7” platter was delivered unto the world, but nothing before had as much impact. Somehow they crammed seven songs on seven inches and the mini-anthems that GBV would eventually make famous began to reach the record-collecting hipsters. The street cred Siltbreeze had accrued up to that point helped in this regard: the label was known for releasing raw punk rock as well as the fucked-up disorder known as The Dead C. Every project seemed to embody the lo-fi aesthetic in both packaging and sound. GBV’s entry may have lacked the disorder that most of the label's releases seemed to share, but theirs was one catchy single and its effect was contagious.
Commemorating the record's 10th Anniversary, Siltbreeze has reissued the classic single with four live bonus tracks from the era. Stations is a mini-Bee Thousand or Alien Lanes and fans of either who have not yet heard this 7” will love this classic period in GBV history.
Even so, it's hard to accept such a look-back from a forward-thinking label. It just smells like an exercise in banking on the past with the meager amount (under 10 minutes) of bonus material. GBV fans experienced something similar to this when Scat Records discontinued their CD twofer of Propeller and Vampire on Titus in favor of individual releases of each album once the band was garnering attention in the mainstream – something that wouldn't smell so suspect if the twofer had never been issued to begin with.
By reissuing this classic single with some live versions of already released songs, Siltbreeze has done a minor disservice to this little masterpiece, but the album is still mandatory listening for any fan of GBV. As such, we should largely be thankful for Siltbreeze's role in its creation.
By Ted Sonnenschein
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