REVIEWS:
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
God knows I hate to be the "bad guy" and the bearer of anti-hype, but I just can't escape that word feared by fanatics of thousands of bands the world round: overrated. I'll admit that Pavement's heralded debut album was tremendously influential and acts as the be-all-end-all embodiment of Pavement's trademark slacker "don't give a fuck" sound, but that still doesn't hold up a bigass stop sign to the fact that only about half of the songs on the album appeal to me. The album's key facet and the reason for its massive influence is its slapshod, lo-fi feel; this isn't to say that this is the first album of its kind ever produced, but it's certainly the first one to appeal to a wide audience (mostly consisting of music critics and trendy college students, a fact which I don't actually know but I love making generalizations).
First things first -- I love the sound of the album. The production is fuzzy and most of the songs have a really distant sound but they're still backed up by a solid rock bite and the resulting feel is really, really unique. My problem with the album is that instead of using the unique sound to elevate strong songwriting to even higher levels, the band spends half of the album dicking around with endlessly-irritating noise rockers ("No Life Singed Her" has to be one of the most annoying and ear-bursting songs ever recorded) and some frustratingly so-so generic indie-rock shlock. There isn't anything particularly offensive about "Summer Babe" or "Loretta's Scars," but the songs just kind of walk by on a clopping beat covered in waves of fuzzy guitars; they do have melodies but they sound like they were improvised in the studio and then looped three times.
Don't get me wrong -- I've got nothing against experimentation. It's just that Pavement manage to churn out several songs that apply their distinctive approach to more traditional-sounding melodies and those songs turn out so utterly awesome that it's a bit annoying that they didn't just do the same thing for the whole album. The catchy single "Trigger Cut" flows incredibly well and has a fantastic, natural-sounding transition from verse to chorus, and the band manages to shove out one of the coolest drone-rock guitar-backings ever for the marching "In The Mouth A Desert." "Here" and "Zurich Is Stained" are relatively poppy and straightforward songs that show that Stephen Malkmus really is capable of a decent vocal performance when he isn't sleepwalking his way through a song, and even though "Jackals, False Grails: The Lonesome Era" is kind of directionless, I just can't resist that murky distorted groove, even if I can hardly remember the actual melody at all. This type of material is just f'in great, which really makes it bug me that instead of exploring similar terrain for the album's other 20 minutes they mess around with boring stuff like "Fame Throwa" (with two fake endings that only serve to drag out the song even longer than it needs to go). The album is certainly interesting, and as far as its impact on music is concerned it's pretty much to 1992 what Nevermind was to 1991, but I just don't think that the music lives up to the album's massive reputation. It's a pretty decent album, but if you're impatient you might be pressing the "forward" button a lot to gloss over the more irritating parts.
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
Oooooooooooh yeah. This is what I was talking about in that last review. Pavement valiantly showed on roughly half of Slanted and Enchanted that they had the ability to write a melody that could kick your average listener's ass across the room when they weren't assaulting said listener's ears with bursts of random indie crap, and for the followup they actually went and made a whole album of the stuff. The production values have been pumped up to the extreme at the expense of most of the debut's intriguing mystique, but when it's also at the expense of songs like "Chelsey's Little Wrists," I'm willing to compromise. As far as I'm concerned this is as close to a masterpiece as the band ever came close to, with their warped take on melody still completely intact from last time around only this time applied to even more conventional modes of songwriting, and wonderous stuff occurs -- you can actually sing along with the songs! Without feeling guilty in a "We Didn't Start The Fire" sort of way! You probably wouldn't be able to understand any of the lyrics you're singing, though, so humming would suffice, or kazooing, yeah, that's the shit. The public at large took notice of the more accessible tone of the material by making the rambling, mainstream-slamming anthem "Cut Your Hair" an MTV hit, and I have to say that it's probably the best song I've heard with "oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo" as a chorus. The jangly country tune "Range Life" also got a bit of attention for its offhanded putdowns of Smashing Pumpkins ("they ain't got no function") and Stone Temple Pilots, but I don't think it received the exposure that the aforementioned song did.
Throughout the album the birth of a new, poppy Pavement for the smarter half of the MTV generation consistently pops out of the woodwork, with only the kinda-boring "Heaven Is A Truck" and the droning closer "Fillmore Jive" registering as lesser material. Right as the album starts you know you're in for an interesting ride with the riffy, tempo-shifting opener "Silence Kit" and its similar but no-less-exciting followup "Elevate Me Later." The excitement doesn't let up as the tracklisting zooms through the rocker "Unfair" and the fantastic guitar ballad "Gold Soundz," both of which are infused with an uneasy tone that gives the material just the edge it needs to escape genericism and take a warm and cozy seat in Classic Land. The bizarre piano instrumental "5+4=Unity" shows a penchant for diversity not before displayed by Malkmus and his cohorts, and the apocalyptic, charging "Hit The Plane Down" is just about the perfect fusion of indie-rock songwriting with glitzy production values as far as I'm concerned. If all Pavement sounded like this, I'd be a much bigger fan of the band. It's definitely the poppiest album of their early period (if a band with five albums can be said to have an "early period") and sometimes gets treated as one of the band's weaker albums by purists who like themselves the fuzzy guitar sounds, but ehh. That's their opinion. This is mine. And if you think I'm going to put someone else's opinion in my review, you're sadly, sadly mistaken -- this is the peak of all things Pavement, and that's all there is to it.
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
Pavement ist Rad! Or so the little man with the pointy cap on the back cover of the album tells me, even though the album he's promoting is a bit of a step back for the band. I give credit to the definitive slacker band for deciding not to act like slackers for a few minutes and releasing an album only a year after the one that came before it (a seemingly impossible move in today's increasingly-corporate music world), but the rub is that they didn't feel like keeping their ambitions in check and made the album almost an hour long. An hour of Crooked Rain-type music wouldn't be a problem in my book, but the album seems to me like more of a fusion of the styles of both of the band's first two full-lengths -- it's just as jagged and frustratingly uneven as Slanted, but it has much clearer production and relies more on typical rock songwriting. The product of the crazy dudes' ambitions is spread out across eighteen tracks which tend to range from "really good, but not quite 'Trigger Cut' or 'Cut Your Hair' level" to "egh, why did they feel that people needed a song like this?'" Hey, Pavement have two singles with "Cut" in the title! It's like Talking Heads' unending obsession with writing songs about lifetimes in a way, not really though. Luckily, the quality is mostly slanted (but not enchanted) in the direction of the former category rather than the latter, with a bunch of really good tracks lining the canvas, their impact slightly dulled by dots of mediocre dullness placed in regular intervals over the album's slightly-overlong running time.
The good stuff is choice material, plain and simple - the opening acoustic ballad "We Dance" gains distinctiveness points for Malkmus' amusingly-accented vocals and the opening line "There is no....castration fear," not to mention a great melody (which usually helps), and at that point "Rattled By The Rush" gives the album a shot of adrenaline with an ultra-obvious but nevertheless exciting riff. "Grounded" and "Grave Architecture" aren't quite Pavement classics but do have strong melodies that are hard to remember at first but eventually take on that "Oh, that song!....That song's great!" quality to them that characterizes all good album tracks, and the penultimate track "Half A Canyon"(with a generic but irresistable Eastern-ish keyboard lick) and a few hilarious speedy punk tunes keep the energy level reasonably high. It's too bad that great songs like these have to share the same album with squawky filler like "Brinx Job," total boredom like "Pueblo," directionless drivel like "Extradition" and total unadulterated garbage like "Fight This Generation," which sounds like what would happen if Fugazi suddenly lost all of their musical talent but kept writing songs anyway, the bastards. The album's grown on me since I bought it and has an album cover with that great irreplaceable "what the hell is that supposed to mean?" factor, but I don't quite agree with the band's fanbase in naming this their all-time peak, a label I've seen slapped onto this album a lot. Pity for the fans isn't part of my game plan.
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
Pavement came down with a bit of a case of senioritis on their senior album, if you ask me. At the time of its release, this was seen as the band's most normal album yet, for the most part tossing aside most of their signature indie-rock weirdness for the sake of concentrating on a more typical 1990's Everyband mix of slow rockers and slow ballads. Even though I'm not as enamoured of Pavement's early albums as some people are, one thing I could always hand to them was that even in their most head-scratching moments they were at least intriguing and never actually openly boring. The opener "Stereo" certainly lives up to their former legacy -- the song strikes me as a perfect encapsulation of every one of the band's trademarks, with random but totally hilarious lyrics (including an unforgettable verse about Mr Balls-In-Vice himself Geddy Lee), Malkmus' usual vocal antics (singing part of the first verse to the melody of "Ring Around The Rosy" for no reason at all) and a melody that doesn't even seem like a melody until the band suddenly pulls it all together into a wonderful bouncy fist-shaking chorus. Even if the song can easily be viewed as irritating self-parody, it's addictive enough to be easily one of my favorite songs by them.
The rest of the album lacks the addictive spark of its opener, though, with the enjoyability of the songs actually resting on whether or not it has a solid melody, which is fine for most bands but rather atypical for Pavement. They come up with winners on the date ballad "Shady Lane"("oh my god, oh your god, oh his god, over god, it's everybody's god, it's everybody's god" - what an interesting chorus) and "Embassy Row," pretty much the only time an uptempo riff-rocker has stood as a standout on a Pavement album. On the other hand, slow, plodding songs like "We Are Underused" and the drearily-long closer "Fin" just serve to suck the energy out of the listener without offering up anything in the way of solid, digestible hooks of the type usually offered readily by the band. Some of the songs benefit from fairly mundane though still interesting elements not seen before on a Pavement album, like the ringing guitar tone that propells "Date With Ikea" (which turns out being fuzzy and indie-ish anyway) or the beat box (at least, it sounds like a beat box) on the groovy "Blue Hawaiian." In the end, though, it's all just window dressing in the face of songwriting which simply isn't as strong as it was before. The only other song which escapes pretty much unscatched in my mind is the towering "Type Slowly," which rules like some kind of marching ruling machine and easily would've fit right in on Crooked Rain without being a wussy little underdog.
The songs I just slightly wrote off aren't bad by any means, and each and every song on the album is listenable, which isn't something I can say about significant portions of Slanted And Enchanted. It's just that the whole affair lacks that zing, that zip, that zork, that return to zork, that zork nemesis, that zork: grand inquisitor that gave the band it's distinctive edge which was really what the band was all about for me even though I gave their two most well-respected albums 7's like the contradictory hypocrite that I am. I'll take inconsistency over consistent boredom any day, though - even when Malkmus was screaming "I'LL TRY AND I'LL TRY AND I'LL TRY AND I'LL TRY!!" it at least gave my ears something to dwell on. 'Salright, but 'scertainly nothing special.
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
I honestly do like Pavement, but try as I might, I just can't get away from the nagging feeling that their output besides Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain has been incredibly inconsistent. This album, their final before their dissolution, doesn't manage to escape this law of the land. It's by far their most streamlined and well-produced, with Nigel Godrich of OK Computer knob-twiddling fame behind the plate-glass wall, not to mention the band finally recording on a 24-track for the first time, but the new approach leaves a bit to be desired. First off, when I said "well-produced," I meant technically well-produced -- aside from the aforementioned OKComputer I'm not incredibly fond of Godrich's production style. He almost always seems to take the harder edges off of any potentially-gripping material a band might have, presenting listeners with a beautiful, well-organized sound that ultimately blends into a uniform mush of gorgeous nothingness. Also, Malkmus apparently shifted his songwriting style to suit the new format, writing almost nothing but feather-light, college-radio-aimed ballads that admittedly are more distinctive than your average radio pop but definitely have the potential to detour the mind into Snoozeville if you're not paying enough attention.
It's definitely a better album than Brighten The Corners, though, due to a number of unquestionably gorgeous melodies on songs like the bizarrely-titled lead single "Spit On A Stranger," not to mention the gentle "Major Leagues," possibly the most straightforward, pop-tinged song Pavement ever released. On the more intriguing side of things, "Cream Of Gold" and "The Hexx" are dream-like, layered drones that really stand up to repeated listenings, and "Folk Jam" is, I'm not kidding, an honest-to-god Pavement folk jam, though probably the most beautiful, structured and singalongable one I've ever heard. Sadly, most of the rest of the album is either hopelessly generic ("Ann Don't Cry" especially) or fails because the band tries to rock out when the note-perfect production simply won't allow it (the awkward, schizophrenic "Platform Blues" and "Billie," with great verses but an off-melody "I'VE SEEN THE FORTUNE TELLER!" deer-in-headlights chorus that totally doesn't fit the song). The album's neat in that it shows the final culmination of Pavement mellowing out over the course of the whole decade before finally breaking up (Malkmus' 2001 solo debut is supposedly even mellower), and probably their second or third-best overall, but it still isn't among the best music I've ever heard. You can't go wrong if you're a huge Godrich fan, though. If you like his work with Travis, you can't go wrong with this album 'cause it's better.
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