“Game of Pricks” by Guided By Voices

Robert Pollard wrote "Game of Pricks", with the band sharing the credit, and it turns up on Alien Lanes, the eighth full-length from American lo-fi outfit Guided by Voices, released on April 4, 1995. That record was their first for Matador, which signed them with an advance of nearly a hundred thousand dollars, a big-ticket deal by the label's standards. By the account in James Greer's band history, recording the thing cost about ten dollars, not counting the beer.

That gap between the money and the method says plenty about the album. Rolling Stone's Matt Diehl heard hooks, brains and a real love of melody, knocked sideways by a spiky, whimsical taste for experiment, and Caroline Sullivan in the Guardian liked how the songs gave Pollard barely enough room to wheeze out a few cryptic lines while Tobin Sprout's guitar scratched out a rowdy tune.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz.