Pavement
The NATN Pantheon
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Slanted & Enchanted (1992)
Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain (1994)
Recommended
Wowee Zowee (1995)
Worth Hearing
Westing (By Musket & Sextant) (1993)
Brighten The Corners (1997)
Preston School of Industry - All This Sounds Gas (2001)
Stephen Malkmus - Stephen Malkmus (2001)
Obsessives Only
Terror Twilight (1999)
Stephen Malkmus - Pig Lib (2003)
Preston School of Industry - Monsoon (2004)
Stephen Malkmus - Face The Truth (2005)
It's hard to believe that less than ten years after my high school graduation, Pavement are looked upon as somewhat untrendy -- almost obsolete, even. Some knucklehead looking for bandmates in the craigslist musicians' section summed it up like this: "Who listens to Pavement anymore?"
But while their almost willful efforts during their mid-'90s heyday to stave off mainstream acceptance and thwart any critic's efforts to chart a rational course for their career had rather more far-reaching success than even Pavement might have expected, it's not the band's fault that the cryptic, jangly, slipshod brand of guitar rock that Pavement didn't invent but rather universalized has gone out of fashion in the iPod age. If Stephen Malkmus' potshots at the Stone Temple Pilots and Smashing Pumpkins on "Range Life" mean less than nothing now, it was an accepted thing when I was 14 that you either listened to Pavement or you listened to Bush, and it was damn clear which side was in the right.
A lot of the things that made Pavement unique have fallen by the wayside as time has moved on. The two drummers. The guarantee of at least one completely horrible song per album. The outright conservatism of their worldview ("simply put, I want to grow old," Malkmus sang, just as the band was doing exactly that). But the base traits that made Pavement all-time greats and guaranteed the place of their first two LPs -- the labyrinthine Slanted & Enchanted and the expansive Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain in the pantheon -- are the most timeless ones imaginable, not far removed from the Dylan tunes Stephen Malkmus played with his side project Crust Brothers. Intelligent lyrics that beg for multiple competing interpretations. Durable melodies that don't smack you across the face with their obviousness but rather draw you in and invite you to make your own conclusions. And hey, a willingness to go out on a limb and really suck sometimes. It's worth more than you think.
Pavement's beginnings stemmed from the powerful boredom that life in Stockton, Calif., can breed. Malkmus and his longtime friend Scott (Spiral Stairs) Kannberg started making records in 1989 more for lack of anything better to do than any sort of plan for global underground rock domination. Their early singles suffer somewhat from being clustered all together on the often tedious Westing (By Musket and Sextant), but amongst large chunks of self-indulgent noisemaking the songs begin to pile up ever more convincingly -- "Box Elder," "Debris Slide," "From Now On."
Completely bypassing their awkward adolescence phase, Pavement seized the moment and the somewhat unwarranted buzz their Drag City records had earned them by making Slanted & Enchanted, their instant-classic marvel of a debut album. Suddenly they went from not being able to generate an album's worth of decent material in three years of fevered recording to creating an almost-flawless 14 songs that not only delivered on every promise they'd ever made but also revealed many elements to their sound they'd not even hinted at before. "Summer Babe," "Trigger Cut," and "Loretta's Scars" were wobbly pop songs guaranteed to live on in college-band covers forever. "Here" and "Zurich Is Stained" reveal Malkmus' unsuspected talent for crafting melodically heartbreaking, lyrically opaque ballads. "Conduit For Sale!" and "Perfume-V" somehow harnessed the annoying weirdness of most of the EPs to actual songs. Great songs. Nobody saw it coming.
What's really amazing is that when Slanted & Enchanted made Pavement the biggest indie rock band in the world, they weren't even really a "band" per se, just Malkmus, Kannberg, and Gary Young, the 40-something guy who recorded their singles, on drums. Slanted doesn't even have real bass, just weirdly equalized guitar. Most of Pavement's signature sound was, and would continue to be, the product of multiple Malkmus guitar overdubs. The Luxe & Redux reissue of the album is instructive on the good and bad points of this approach. To the good is a collection of studio B-sides as strong as the album tracks if not stronger (the majestic "Greenlander" being the standout). To the bad is a bunch of contemporaneous live tracks that further secure Pavement's hard-won reputation as one of the worst stage bands on the planet.
The Watery, Domestic EP is included on the Luxe & Redux issue but should really be treated as a separate release. It's a major turning point. It's Gary Young's last recording with the band and a very odd look at the Pavement that might have been. Much darker than Slanted, it's a potent mixture of good time and bad trip, much like the erratic Young himself. Watery only has four songs but they're longer and sound more like the work of an actual ensemble, with buildups and breakdowns. Still no real bass, though.
Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, like all the Pavement records to follow, is a complete turnaround from its predecessor. It's not surprising for a band that was adding three new members, although it's anyone's guess how much bassist Mark Ibold and percussionist Bob Nastanovich really brought to the sessions. New drummer Steve West certainly looked like he belonged in Pavement, with his floppy hair and Coke-bottle glasses, but he was nowhere near the drummer nor the provocateur Young was. Pavement would continue to suck live, and now weren't even particularly interesting to look at while doing it.
Little matter: Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain was their second classic in a row. Malkmus' songwriting typically responded to the clearer production and more settled instrumentation by installing twistier structures into songs like "Newark Wilder," "Silence Kit," and the epic "Fillmore Jive." In context, the startling immediacy of "Cut Your Hair" and "Gold Soundz" sounds like Pavement's wildest experiment yet. "Range Life" effortlessly absorbs country, "5-4=Unity" dabbles in jazz, and "Hit The Plane Down" (awfully) parodies techno. Malkmus' lyrics for the first time have identifiable characters, whether it's the Quadrophenia/Springsteen skate punks of "Silence Kit" and "Range Life" or Malkmus himself teetering at the brink of demistardom in "Cut Your Hair" and the SoCal-bashing "Unfair." Crooked Rain is Pavement's classic rock record, complete with the perfect theme for the late, unlamented 1990s. It's statement rock about indecision: "There's 40 different shades of black," "I/they don't have no function," "fame's a career/Korea." It even ends on a sentence fragment: "Their throats are filled with...."
There are even more brilliant B-sides from the 1993-94 period now collected on Crooked Rain's reissue, which is subtitled L.A.'s Desert Origins. "Camera" and "Unseen Power Of The Picket Fence" pay sideways tribute to R.E.M., whose producers Mitch Easter and Don Dixon were employed by Pavement for Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. "The Sutcliffe Catering Song" is the best version of a wonderful and elusive tune that Pavement has released something like nine times by now. "Strings Of Nashville," just voice, guitar, and wind machine, ranks among Malkmus' very best work. Origins resentfully goes on with about half a disc's worth of inconclusive studio goofs, once again revealing that Pavement is definitely a band where the end product is more important than the process.
That's the point of Wowee Zowee, if Pavement's third album can even be said to have a point. Recorded very rapidly on the heels of Crooked Rain, Wowee Zowee is almost all loose ends. A hell of a lot of it sounds completely as if it was made up on the spot. You can pick a multitude of combinations from among its 18 tracks that make it sound like several different albums. "Grounded," "Pueblo," and "Grave Architecture" could be the cornerstone of a more austere Crooked Rain sequel. "Half A Canyon," "Extradition," and "Rattled By The Rush" reveal a previously unhinted-at fascination with demented blues structures. "We Dance" and "Father To A Sister of Thought" progress further towards the insurgent country of Will Oldham's Palace Brothers and Malkmus' buddy David Berman's band, the Silver Jews.
Buried in the murk are some fine ol' Pavement songs like the antistatement "AT&T" and Spiral Stairs' greatest accomplishment to date, "Kennel District." But also, a lot more murk. "Fight This Generation" continues a rather annoying Malkmus habit of prefacing the real song with a very long, very slow intro. "Motion Suggests" and "Black Out" and "Extradition" are all more or less the same song. The entire thing is sequenced to be as un-listener-friendly as possible, and as it turned out, Malkmus didn't have nearly enough songs to start recording and releasing unfinished ones.
Wowee Zowee: Sordid Sentinels Edition makes this abundantly clear; the only unreleased "songs" on it after the bounty of the first two reissues are a 28-second snippet and another that's half that long. This is also the point where the quality of Pavement's B-sides really started to slide, never a good sign. Malkmus' shoegazer-funk "Kris Kraft" is a standout, and Kannberg's poppy "Painted Soldiers" continues his hot streak, but after that the pickings get slim. The reissue muddles the chronology a little bit, but those of you who were Pavement fans back in the day may remember being at first bewildered and then eventually embracing Wowee Zowee. Combined with Slanted, Watery, Crooked Rain, and the wealth of almost universally excellent CD singles covering the three albums, Wowee Zowee put the capper on an amazing five-year period of creative activity in the most Pavement-esque way possible.
Then in 1996 Pavement put out the Pacific Trim EP -- and nothing else -- and the party was over. The four songs from Pacific Trim (included on the Wowee Zowee reissue) in retrospect are the exact point in time where the band (more specifically, Malkmus) start to slide into smug self-parody. "Give It A Day" is a Pavement-by-numbers song so obvious it sounds like it was automatic-written, "Gangsters & Pranksters" a shrill one-note joke, "Saganaw" a turgid time-waster, and "I Love Perth" a fragment recorded only to justify the existence of a separate (and more expensive) "Australian tour edition." They had enough momentum to crank out one more solid album, but this was the beginning of the end. No longer was every stray idea Pavement threw onto vinyl coming out sounding like gold.
On Brighten The Corners you can hear them straining, for the first time, although the self-doubt creeping into Malkmus' voice on songs like "We Are Underused" is a welcome change for indie's most reliably arrogant pinup. "Stereo" manages to harness atonal Sonic Youth guitars to a chipper leadoff track and would-be hit single, kind of a neat accomplishment. "Starlings Of The Slipstream" achieves the grandeur that Wowee Zowee's slower tracks were too unfocused to nail down. "Embassy Row," after another one of those pointless long intros, eventually arrives as a neat little rocker complete with smokin' guitar solo.
All of these songs would merely be among the lesser tracks on Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, however, and for the first time on a Pavement album, tracks that aren't supposed to be deliberately bad come across that way. "Shady Lane" is another cruise-control Malkmus pop song, Pavement for people who don't like Pavement. "Fin" is a sad attempt at an album-ending jam after the triumph of "Fillmore Jive," it merely sags where it ought to soar. And "Type Slowly" is just a godawful abortion. After hearing it for the first time I realized my favorite band was indeed fallible, a loss of innocence on par with my earlier conclusion that the whole Tooth Fairy/Santa Claus/Easter Bunny axis was a dirty hoax. The worst Pavement song ever by a wide margin. Yes, including "Hit The Plane Down."
Corners is saved, quite unexpectedly, by Spiral Stairs, who delivers the fine "Date w/ IKEA" and "Passat Dream," while, if not particularly distinguished, breaks up the monotony of all the pastoral Malkmus tunes. Brighten The Corners has yet to receive the reissue treatment from Matador, but judging by the singles from this period it will hardly be a must-hear when it does. The Shady Lane EP has no real songs past a jokey but still horrible "Type Slowly" rearrangement. The Stereo EP, which was promo-only on these shores, is better, offering "Westy Can't Drum," minor Malkmus, and "Winner Of The," another surprisingly good Spiral Stairs song. Terror Twilight, past the entertainingly out-of-key vocals by Mark Ibold and Spiral Stairs on "Carrot Rope," is for all intents and purposes a Stephen Malkmus solo album. It's almost completely devoid of joy, and the arrangements seem constructed purposefully to prevent the band from ever gaining momentum. What's really peculiar about it is that all the songs have more or less the same tempo and general sound. Large stretches of the second side blur into each other in exactly the wrong way. "Spit On A Stranger" and "Major Leagues" are two more cynical manipulations of the Malkmus formula, as if rewriting "Gold Soundz" was somehow the secret path to the brass ring. "The Hexx," with its Sabbath-y guitar riffing, is the one interesting example of the new sound Malkmus was cultivating with producer Nigel Godrich.
Except for "The Hexx" and "Carrot Rope," there weren't any good songs on Terror Twilight, so it shouldn't come as any surprise that the B-sides from the tail end of Pavement's career are pretty piss-poor as well. Spit On A Stranger has a bunch of Malkmus songs and Major Leagues has the Spiral Stairs songs that didn't make the cut for the album, so take your pick. The bouncy "Harness Your Hopes," on the former, has a bit of a spark to it, and the double-EP Major Leagues is a good place to get your hands on Pavement's excellent version of Echo And The Bunnymen's "The Killing Moon." Otherwise, neither songwriter had much juice left. It was time to break up.
Stephen Malkmus' first solo album, given the unmitigated horror of Terror Twilight, was actually a rather pleasant surprise. Gone were the overproduction and the counterintuitive arrangements. "Jo Jo's Jacket" and "Jenny & The Ess-Dog" were the man's peppiest and cleverest songs since side three of Wowee Zowee. "The Hook" is about pirates, for Christ's sake. "Church On White" is a thoughtful and (gasp) mature tribute to a lost friend. The worst songs on Stephen Malkmus, in fact, are the ones that sound the most like Pavement, the sort of Brighten-esque "Discretion Grove" and "Trojan Curfew." Unfortunately, the following tour and all subsequent solo Malkmus releases have followed an inexplicable and completely unrewarding path. For reasons known only to Stephen Malkmus, the man has decided to set himself up as the new Jerry Garcia, producing unmemorable compositions that serve merely as platforms for guitar solos. This is stupid for any number of reasons. First of all, Malkmus isn't that great of a guitar player, and as a brief survey of the various studio jams on the Matador reissues shows, he's not at all a good improviser. Second of all, the vast majority of the fanbase he built as the majordomo of Pavement has little to no interest in jam bands, and the few who do (like, say, me) have good enough taste to know a pretender when they hear one. Third of all, Trey Anastasio is still alive and in robust health.
Why, Stephen, why? Take your pick between Pig Lib and Face The Truth, if you absolutely have to, but I would strongly recommend staying away. Face The Truth has a few attempts to recapture that old Slay Tracks magic that stick out like sore thumbs, while Pig Lib is just wanking all the way through; on both albums, Malkmus seems to have completely lost track of his once-genius songwriting muse.
Spiral Stairs' first post-Pave release as Preston School Of Industry was the nice-sounding but pretty much song-free Goodbye To The Edge City EP; All This Sounds Gas was a huge surprise when it came out later the same year. By default the best solo Pavement album, Gas is hardly Spiral's All Things Must Pass (note the similarity in titles, though) but it does indicate that Kannberg accumulated at least an album side's worth of decent material during Pavement's Twilight period. "Falling Away" is a good single, "Solitaire" and "Take A Stand" reveal unsuspected lyrical depths, and the album's stabs at country ("A Treasure At Silver Bank") and psychedelia ("History Of The River") are more sincere than anything Malkmus had done since Brighten The Corners. However, whatever minor advances All This Sounds Gas might have made, followup Monsoon was a complete disaster. Weeks of work from top laboratory scientists were completely unable to uncover a single song on the album despite the misleading 10 listed on the sleeve.
In a way, Matador Records has done their once-flagship band no favors since the breakup. They certainly didn't need to release both Malkmus and Kannberg's debut solo releases so close together. They deeply need to hire some kind of life coach to cuff Malkmus around until he knocks it off with the Ten Years After stuff already. The various Pavement reissues, while beautifully packaged and annotated, don't accomplish very much as far as the protection of their legacy is concerned. In their haste to get folks to buy new copies of albums they already own, Matador has crammed a lot of pretty bad material on to their new versions of Slanted & Enchanted, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, and Wowee Zowee. I'm quite fearful of what they might dredge up for the reissues of the bad albums.
Indeed, part of what has been forever lost from the Pavement story is their mystique. For their first few years of activity, and really for some time until Crooked Rain came out, nobody really knew who Pavement was. Their records just said "S.M." and "Spiral Stairs." When the band let their music speak for itself, things were great; when Stephen Malkmus started memorizing his press clippings, the backlash which continues to this day started with a vengeance.
But you know what? The music scene is crazy. Bands start up each and every day. Pavement didn't have a particularly long period in the sun, or a graceful ride out of it, but the more time passes the more we'll forget about Terror Twilight and Malkmus' stupid handcuff prop and even Bob Nastanovich's famous horse racing tip sheet. "Summer Babe" and "Fillmore Jive" and "Shoot The Singer" and "Range Life" and "Strings Of Nashville" we'll remember forever. And if we start to forget, Matador will engineer a reunion tour.
MARK T.R. DONOHUE | Mark T.R. Donohue is a prolific freelance writer whose areas of expertise include Rockies baseball, video games, genre television, English soccer, and pub rock. He lives in Colorado, where he cultivates the largest and creepiest private collection of Alyson Hannigan memorabilia in the Mountain West.