Anti-Climacus

I spent most of the last week listening to various things I've written about a few times already (Jimi Hendrix, Guided By Voices), so I thought I'd instead go for biographically-appropriate opening lines. Witness also Michael Stipe doing literally every rock-star move we all associate with Eddie Vedder.

The actual theme for this week's music post is the surprise of the old. I was out with a friend last weekend, and the restaurant we were eating at played Guided By Voices' Alien Lanes all the way through. I've liked Bee Thousand since I bought it, but could never quite make heads or tails of Alien Lanes despite owning in for several years--28 songs will do that, even if the album as a whole is less than 50 minutes (the shorter songs, in fact, make the whole thing a little more confusing to get a handle on).

The usual process for listening to an album, very much like the process of re-reading a book, is almost always piecemeal. Except for the existence of 'instant classics' where the scope and ambition of the whole is obvious from the beginning, and appreciated as such (probably a grand total of ten albums in my lifetime), you find a few songs you like, and gradually learn to appreciate the rest. On My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, it was "Monster" and "Runaway," and then everything else, within the space of a couple weeks. For Alien Lanes, the number of songs I liked would gradually increase--"My Valuable Hunting Knife," a few months later "As We Go Up, We Go Down," more recently "Motor Away"--but the whole remained impenetrable. And then you're out, and you hear the beginning of "A Salty Salute," and you realize you know three quarters of the songs already, and the environment is perfect to push you over the edge into loving the album.

This is not an unknown phenomenon for me. The third R.E.M. album I ever purchased--Fables of the Reconstruction--made it through half a listen before I put it on the shelf for six months because it didn't sound like Out of Time or Automatic for the People. It's happened at various other points, as something moves from ignored to essential. It's the great joy of reserving judgment in matters of aesthetics, as in life: you never know when the album you were indifferent to will become the one you want.