Hope this isn't presumptuous, as I never got "official" clearance to post an AOTW, but it's been a while since I've seen one, so I don't think I'll be stepping on anyone's toes. I had posted some Pavement love in the "What's Everyone Listening To?" thread a few weeks ago and folks were generally supportive of seeing this thread, so I went ahead and wrote it.
I'm going to start with a little bit of potentially boring personal history, so if you just want to kick out the jams, skip down to the ***... line.
I don't remember exactly how I became aware of Pavement, but before I discovered the Truckers, they were my biggest musical obsession among bands actually active during my lifetime. I was too young to be aware of them while they were active; Slanted and Enchanted came out when I was five years old. Terror Twilight came out when I was 12 and then Pavement was gone. I was not nearly that cool a 12-year-old.
I think Pitchfork gave one of their albums a perfect 10.0, and the description caught my attention. Various critics called them the best band of the 90s, so I think I decided to spend some misbegotten college years figuring out what the Pavement thing was all about.
I'll also say that I would've been better equipped to write this intro eight or 10 years ago. There are two reasons for this, both fairly simple. First, much of my musical time over the past decade has been dedicated to immersing myself in what we'll call "Truckers-adjacent" music. I had never really delved into country in any serious way until Wilco and Uncle Tupelo hinted at what I'd been missing out on, so I had a lot of catching up to do. Second, I began dating my now-wife in 2010. She hates Pavement. Like, just loathes the sound Stephen Malkmus's voice. She never does this normally, but if a Pavement song comes on shuffle in the car, she will literally reach over and change it as soon as the vocals start.
I remember having to get used to Malkmus's vocal style; he's sometimes more "around" the melody than right on it, so you kind of have to fill in the melodies to some amazing, hooky songs in your head. All part of their "slacker" charm, I guess. I tried for a while to find my wife something she could latch onto, but she just can't get past the vocals. I have bands that fall into that category for me, too, so I guess I have to respect it. But the consequence has been Pavement doesn't get played much anymore unless I'm in late-night headphone mode, in the interest of keeping the peace in the home.
But like I said, this band has meant a lot to me, and when I saw there's not an AOTW entry for them, I thought I'd take the opportunity to help the interested-but-uninitiated dive in to a rich catalog of music. I know there are other Pavement fans here, so I hope you'll chime in with additional observations, corrections, and perspectives. Part of the "Pavement thing" is that the studio albums are only part of the story: b-sides, outtakes, and the like are part of the mystique, and I'm less well-versed on some of that stuff than I maybe should be, given how much I've played this band over the years. Okay, so, the music.
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Pavement started with what could be described as a brilliant, cryptic guerrilla marketing campaign. EPs started circulating around the underground, attributed to "SM and Spiral Stairs." SM was Stephen Malkmus, the driving creative force behind the band. Spiral Stairs was his partner in crime, Scott Kannberg.
They came together with an older drummer--ex-hippie, problem drinker, and "local character" Gary Young--to record their early work. I'll freely admit that the pre-Slanted stuff is a blindspot for me.
But let's fast forward to the studio album era. For each studio album, I'll link to a few of my favorite tracks on YouTube. Embedding will only lengthen what's already shaping up to be a long post. I apologize in advance that I have a hard time picking "highlights" for this band, the same way I'd have a hard time limiting myself to my favorite two or three songs from each DBT record.
I tend toward Pavement's more melodic tracks, so YMMV on these if you're more into the fractured, chaotic, noise-rock side of things. Like I mentioned, there's also a wealth of EPs and singles and things that come in between these records. Rather than try to address all of those individually, I'll lean on the great work Matador did with the reissue series, in which they lumped the gallimaufry together with the relevant "era" of the band (typically with the preceding studio album).
So without further ado, the band's debut LP and undisputed masterpiece, Slanted and Enchanted.
Slanted and Enchanted, 1992
Just a brilliant album from start to finish. One of my all-time favorite album covers, to boot.
Weird, melodic, chaotic, and somehow cohesive. A lot of short songs that worm their way into your brain, rattle around for a minute or two or three or four, and then vanish. It's a great intro to Malkmus's lyrical style, which is mostly opaque, sometimes nonsensical, and yet consistently evocative. Sometimes you get the feeling he just likes how certain words sound together, but he still manages to establish a mood within a song, even if you have no goddamn idea what he's talking about. It's something that I've always admired about him, even if I do sometimes wish he'd let us in a little bit more. These are songs that invite--and resist--interpretation. They fight like hell. "Here" might be in my all-time top 20, and there are lots of days that I'm not convinced it's even the best song on this record.
Quintessential Pavement Lyric: "Painted portraits of minions and slaves/crotch mavens and one-night plays/Are they the only ones who laugh at the jokes when they are so bad?/And the jokes they're always bad/But they're not as bad as this/Come join us in a prayer/We'll be waiting, waiting where/Everything's ending here"
-"Here"
Choice Cuts: Listen to the whole album. But if I have to choose, "Summer Babe - Winter Version,"
"Trigger Cut/Wounded-Kite at: 17," "In the Mouth a Desert," "Zurich Is Stained," "Here"
Reissue Goodies: Luxe & Reduxe: I think the period in between Slanted and Crooked Rain is my Pavement sweet spot, oddly enough. Still fuzzy and weird as hell, but a more polished band moving in a more consistently melodic direction. In particular, the Peel session and the Watery, Domestic EP are close to perfect, to me. "Greenlander" was part of a compilation benefiting NARAL and it's great, too. Ditto "So Stark (You're a Skyscraper)." Check out "Kentucky Cocktail," "Secret Knowledge of the Backroads," "Texas Never Whispers," "Frontwards," "So Stark (You're a Skyscraper)," and "Greenlander."
Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, 1994
This was Pavement's brief brush with mainstream success, and probably their most accessible record. Slanted and Enchanted was critically adored, so this was their chance to build on that buzz and catapult to the next level. Gary Young had washed out of the band, which was by this time a proper five-piece touring unit(not the tossed-off studio dickaround they sometimes seemed to be early on). Malkmus and Kannberg had added Mark Ibold on bass, Steve West on drums, and Bob Nastanovich on auxiliary percussion.
Fundamentally, they were probably too weird for whatever mainstream exposure they got to really last. "Cut Your Hair" got some MTV play. I wasn't paying attention at the time on account of being like 7, but my understanding is that that was about the extent of the mainstreaming of Pavement.
Some fun rock trivia related to this album: "Range Life" was a shambling, slacker country-rock gem that started a feud with Billy Corgan and resulted in Pavement's removal from Lollapalooza when Corgan threatened to pull the Smashing Pumpkins out if Pavement was allowed to play. The third verse goes like this:
Out on tour with The Smashing Pumpkins
Nature kids, I/they don't have no function
I don't understand what they mean
And I could really give a fuck
The Stone Temple Pilots, they're elegant bachelors
They're foxy to me, are they foxy to you?
I will agree, there isn't absolutely nothing, nothing more than me
I always took the "I/they" line as tongue-in-cheek complicity in whatever it is he's "accusing" the Pumpkins of, but I guess Billy didn't see it that way.
This might just be the best entry point to Pavement's catalog for a newbie. Pitchfork named "Gold Soundz" the best song of the 90s. "Unfair" is ostensibly about the NorCal/SoCal rivalry and one of their better-known songs (they played it on Fallon during their tempestuous reunion in 2010, and it's on their Greatest Hits album) but it's never been one of my favorites.
Quintessential Pavement Lyric: "After the glow, the scene, the stage, the set/Talk becomes slow, but there's one thing I'll never forget:/Hey, you gotta pay your dues before you pay the rent"
-"Range Life"
Choice Cuts: Again, hard to narrow it down much beyond "This Album is Absolutely Essential Listening," but I love "Silence Kid" (bonus for cowbell!), "Elevate Me Later," "Stop Breathin'," "Gold Soundz," "Range Life," and "Heaven Is a Truck."
Reissue Goodies: LA's Desert Origins: I haven't spent nearly as much time with the miscellany from this time period, but a few highlights to me are "Raft", "Strings of Nashville," "All My Friends," and their tribute (I think) to REM, "Unseen Power of the Picket Fence."
Wowee Zowee, 1995
Any hope of Pavement's continued mainstream flirtation evaporated with Wowee Zowee, which is probably the strangest record in the band's discography. It's beloved by fans, but it definitely employs an "and the kitchen sink" ethos that makes it singular, sprawling, and weird. I've seen it referred to as Pavement's White Album.
I'm not sure if this was an In Utero-type effort to intentionally alienate fans or just Malkmus characteristically not giving a fuck, but I probably wouldn't recommend this as the place to delve into Pavement for the first time. Kannberg at one point ranked the Pavement albums for Vice, and put this one at the bottom. His explanation:
That said, this album has a few of my absolute favorite Pavement tracks, especially "Rattled by the Rush," "Grounded," "Motion Suggests Itself," "Father to a Sister of Thought" (which has honest-to-god pedal steel), "Extradition," "Grave Architecture," and "AT&T." If I had to make a shortlist of Pavement songs to introduce DBT fans to the "Vastness of Pavement," as Ted Leo sings in "Biomusicology," "Grounded" and "Rattled by the Rush" would probably both be in the top five.Spiral Stairs wrote:It's not that I don't like it. Every record I sequenced, but this was the one record where Steve [Malkmus] had all of these other songs he wanted to put on there, which I considered B-sides. So I said we would do it his way, and that's why the record is the record and all of its B-sides.
Some of what I assume are the Kannberg-designated B-sides are also a lot of fun. "Serpentine Pad" is a sneer in song form. "Brinx Job" is falsetto nonsense about robbing an armored truck, I guess, but damned if it doesn't get the toes tapping. This is a band operating at a creative peak and making the art they (well, Malkmus at least) wanted to make. From that standpoint, how could it not be a fan favorite?
Quintessential Pavement Lyric: "He spoke of latent causes, sterile gauzes and the bedside morale/He traipsed around the table, talking sentences so incomplete (plete, plete)/Boys are dying on these streets" <<simple, emotional, kickass guitar fill>>
-"Grounded"
Choice Cuts: "Rattled by the Rush," "Grounded," "Motion Suggests Itself," "Father to a Sister of Thought," and "AT&T".
Reissue Goodies: Sordid Sentinels Edition: Some really fun stuff from this period. I think I once listened to "I Love Perth" like 20 times in a row. It's only about a minute long and it's kind of a poppy throwaway, but it's so fucking catchy that I can't get it out of my head, sometimes. "Give It a Day" starts as a not-quite-accurate treatment of Cotton Mather and Salem that evolves in some interesting directions from there. Only Pavement could cover Schoolhouse Rock and make it as fun as their version of "No More Kings." "Easily Fooled" shows how effortlessly likable these guys were at this point in their career.
Brighten the Corners, 1997
Pavement grown up? In many ways, this record is the logical successor to Crooked Rain. It's a relatively laid-back, mature record in comparison with Wowee Zowee. Pretty much everything here is hummable. The lyrics remain inscrutable, for the most part, which makes the rare straightforward bits more powerful: "the worlds collide, but all that we want is a shady lane."
"Stereo" kicks us off with the record's high water mark in terms of energy. When that song busts into its fuzzed-out, gleeful, almost unhinged chorus, I can't help but smile and nod along. I still don't know what the Kaiser's cyst has to do with anything.
From there, "Shady Lane" is kind of a companion piece to "Range Life," to me: an indie rock paean to maturity and stability that Malkmus presumably wrote right around the time he turned 30. "Transport Is Arranged" is probably my favorite song on the record lyrically, and I think Malkmus' imagery is uniformly some of the strongest of his career on this record. "Date w/ IKEA" is my favorite Pavement song that Kannberg wrote.
Quintessential Pavement Lyric: "I swung my fiery sword/I vent my spleen at the lord/He is abstract and bored/Too much milk and honey/Well, I waltzed through the wilderness with nothing but a compass and a canteen/Setting the scenes/Easy-walking, border-blocking, transport is arranged"
-"Transport is Arranged"
Choice Cuts: "Stereo," "Shady Lane," "Transport Is Arranged," "Old to Begin," "Starlings of the Slipstream," "Fin."
Reissue Goodies: Nicene Creedence Edition: The instrumental "Beautiful as a Butterfly" has its place. "Westie Can Drum" is fun. I love the singsong, playful nonsense of "Harness Your Hopes, which was actually a Terror Twilight-era b-side. "Show me a word that rhymes with 'pavement' and I won't kill your parents and roast them on a spit." But, you know, sung in a fun way.
Terror Twilight, 1999
It's Pavement's swan song, but perhaps it's better viewed as the first solo Malkmus record. For this one, they teamed up with superproducer Nigel Godrich, which has led some to call this record overproduced. I don't really feel that way, personally, and at any rate the songs are more than good enough to overcome any aesthetic quibbles. Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead shows up to play some harmonica.
I do think this is by far the worst album cover of the bunch, but I digress.
"Spit on a Stranger" is a...love song? By Pavement? Unexpected, sure, but I really dig it. "Honey, I'm a prize and you're catch and we're a perfect match."
"Folk Jam," true to its name, is driven by some plinking banjo. Or maybe guitjo. Not my favorite Pavement song by a longshot, but at least they were still finding new things to try at this stage in their career.
"You Are a Light" is a goddamn jam, a multipart freakout that sometimes (in the chorus) seems like a love song, albeit one containing the lyric "watch out for the gypsy children in electric dresses, they're insane/I hear they live in crematoriums and smoke your remains." Regardless, it's catchy as hell and features some of Malkmus's characteristic, idiosyncratic guitar heroics in the later sections.
"Cream of Gold" feels like Pavement's attempt at writing a late-90s rock song that's solid enough for what it is, but not one I go back to very often.
"Major Leagues" might be Malkmus' second-prettiest song ever (behind "Church on White" from his eponymous solo debut). And it's another love song. "You kiss like a rock, but you know I need it anyway." Just a gorgeous song that I'll never not love. "Bring on the Major Leagues," I assume, is an oblique way of saying that the narrator is ready for the real thing in a relationship. That's how I've always interpreted it, anyway.
This album lags a little bit toward the back-half of the middle, in my opinion, but it finds its groove in a big way for the final two tracks in Pavement's enviable catalog. "The Hexx" is a slow-burner with a poetic lyric and an exorcism of a guitar solo that helps explain why Malkmus is so highly regarded as a guitarist, even if he doesn't turn it loose all that often.
"...And Carrot Rope" is the perfect way to say farewell to one of the bands of the decade: light, fun, and mostly nonsensical. No grand statement of purpose or self-importance; Pavement was always too loose for that. The lyric that always stuck with me from this one is "Don't waste your precious breath explaining that you are worthwhile." Pavement never had to explain that; their brief run as one of the best bands on the planet did that for them.
Quintessential Pavement Lyric: "Capistrano swallow, answer to your inner voice and please return/God installed that radar in your pointed little beak so you'd return"
-"The Hexx"
Choice Cuts: "Spit on a Stranger," "You Are a Light," "Major Leagues," "The Hexx," "Carrot Rope".
Pavement broke up, but it seems that Malkmus never quite told the rest of the band until he finally confirmed it in an interview. He went on to quickly release a self-titled debut in 2001, but really wanted to just call his new band The Jicks. The label insisted that his name be front and center, so it is.
I had originally intended to lump Malkmus into this writeup, but it's probably long enough as is. So maybe I'll do an abbreviated intro in the replies to this thread if I get around to it.
Malkmus' explanation of Pavement's breakup after the fact is worth posting here, too. As he told an interviewer in 2000,
I love that bit that I bolded in this quote. "Ten years better" is just an idea that I wish more people would remind themselves of when they start to fall victim to inertia--and not just in music or art, but life in general. I appreciate that the guy just needed to go in a different direction creatively.Malkmus wrote:You try to make some changes, you can say things are going to be different, but then they’re just the same. You hope that it’s just that you’re on tour, that feeling that you don’t ever want to so it again, but it’s not. I was just tired of doing the same thing over and over, different song progressions that were starting to sound the same. If you stick around for ten years you should be ten years better than young bands, try extra hard to be interesting. It didn’t feel like that was happening. It’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks. Or a thirty year old male.”
So Pavement went away. They reunited for a string of shows in 2010, and I had a ticket, but ended up having to work that night. (So I never saw Pavement, but I sure saw Drive-By Truckers...). I sold the tickets. Apparently, the reunion wasn't all smooth sailing, as some of the interpersonal conflict that contributed to the breakup reared its head again. So maybe I missed my chance. Though I recently read a rumor that a 2019 reunion to celebrate the band's 30th anniversary isn't out of the question. Here's hoping. Few bands have accomplished so much with only five studio albums.