The delicious part of my recent exercises in ranking albums, as I recuperate from nearly ten months of writing about the worst songs ever, is how this minor project forces me to reconsider acts I don’t play much. I couldn’t have said so about Pavement twenty years ago when Stephen Malkmus was my beau ideal of a a rock artist: terrific guitarist, unpredictable and sometimes shambolic songwriter, possessor of fabulous bangs. Now I would just as lief play one of the EPs, home of their sexiest material (I could live in Pacific Trim: “Give It a Day”! “Saganaw”!) .
Anyway, herein I rank Pavement:
1. Wowee Zowee (1995)
If you look up “Double Album” in the OED, you’ll see a small illustration of Pavement’s 1995 album. After perplexing the band’s most ardent defenders for a half minute, it quickly grew in esteem because it does what compelling double albums should: perplex, then compel. Fortunately for listeners who took comfort in the laser focus of the previous year’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, the first three tracks delineated what was to come for the next fifty minutes: arch balladry pockmarked with koans (“We Dance”), rockers inebriated with the power of their riffage (“Rattled by the Rush”), and uncharacterizable mid-tempo tone poems (“Black Out”). It has a Spiral Stairs song, but Sugar’s File Under: Easy Listening had “Company Man” and Abbey Road “Octopus’ Garden,” so don’t suffer overmuch. I loved the CD-R mix tape I made of this thing in ’99.
2. Slanted and Enchanted (1992)
Strongest memory: traipsing around Regent’s Park in London the summer of 1997, a copy of this album in my Discman and “No Life Singed Her” blasting. A decade ago Pavement’s debut would have sat comfortably in the rear of my estimation, but the hard thin mix complemented the stoned curves of Malkmus’ weed-dusted tropes.
3. Brighten the Corners (1997)
If so, they didn’t check under the bed (“Type Slowly,” “Fin”). A New Yorker story — by Alex Ross? — compared Malkmus to John Ashbery without noting the most obvious similarity: the frustration of distinguishing the dross from the beautiful unites fans of the songwriter and the late American poet. Pavement’s Technique, substituting ballads for the X-drenched dance tracks on New Order’s 1989 masterpiece, Brighten the Corners boasts a Malkmus not quite ready to go on tour with Smashing Pumpkins, at least not with that wobbly voice (“Type Slowly”). But he matches syllables and guitar sprawl than he would ever again: “Embassy Row,” “Starlings in the Slipstream,” “Shady Lane,” boom, boom, boom.
4. Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain (1994)
Determined to break them, Matador shopped the band like mad in the early spring of 1994, yet despite fawning coverage I didn’t buy their spitshined second full length for another year. That “Cut Your Hair” is one of the weaker cuts speaks to the strength of the rest. When Malkmus sounds kittenish, he’s at his most fetching (“Stop Breathin’,” “Unfair”).
5. Terror Twilight (1999)
Not a band album so much as a distended approximation,Terror Twilight luxuriates in decadence: the tempos, even for the mid-tempo material, slacken; Malkmus experiments with a number of voices and poses; and Nigel Goodrich applies a sheen that in retrospect is garish. Like too many het dudes, he’s ready to split from the boys at the first sign of a relationship hey-hey-hey with a woman. “It’s all right to shake, to fight, to feel,” he yelps on “…And Carrot Rope.” I prefer Pavement when the smudged guitars reflect the mess in any arrangement that’s not a fling, and the often irritating metronomic beating of drummer Steve West signifies their commitment to making do anyway; that’s when I hear them shaking, fighting, feeling. Yet there’s something to be said for Malkmus’ candidness about the price paid. “You kiss like a rock but you know I need it anyway” is worthy of Tennant-Lowe. Few straight guys are so honest about why they start things with women who deserve better.
Humanizing The Vacuum 