Latest Release
- 19 APR 2024
- 2 Songs
- Brighten the Corners: Nicene Creedence Ed. · 1997
- Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain · 1994
- Terror Twilight · 1999
- Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain · 1994
- Slanted & Enchanted · 1992
- Slanted & Enchanted · 1992
- Wowee Zowee · 1995
- Brighten the Corners: Nicene Creedence Ed. · 1997
- Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain · 1994
- Brighten the Corners · 1997
Essential Albums
- Pavement’s second album Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain may be the definitive 1990s indie-rock record, in large part because its lyrical wit and low-key melodic grace feel so tossed-off and casual. The band projected a defiant effortlessness that still sounds incredibly cool today, even without the context of knowing they were deliberately sidestepping the possibility of becoming “the next Nirvana” and dodging a sophomore slump after their 1992 debut, Slanted & Enchanted, was immediately canonised by music critics. They pulled this off mainly by making a bold stylistic pivot from twitchy post-punk and lo-fi artiness to a relaxed stoner vibe, drawing mostly from ’70s West Coast psychedelia and the more jangly end of ’80s college rock. By embracing a looseness that had been a liability in Pavement’s haphazard early live shows, band leader Stephen Malkmus found his voice and delivered a handful of his most enduring songs—the wistfully romantic but oddly aloof “Gold Soundz”, the bratty bubblegum of “Cut Your Hair” and “Range Life”, a gentle folk-rock tune that famously doubles as a Smashing Pumpkins diss track. (Billy Corgan stayed mad about that for a long time.) The deep cuts are even better: “Stop Breathin” is a melodramatic epic that conflates a tennis match with trench warfare, “Newark Wilder” is a melancholy ballad about some kind of ambiguous love triangle and “Unfair” is a sunny punk-rock number satirising the economic and social tensions between Northern and Southern California. (Somehow this was the second time the band wrote a song about this topic.) Malkmus sprinkles his songs with homages to every corner of his impeccable record collection, with overt nods to Dave Brubeck on the instrumental “5-4=Unity” and to Buddy Holly’s “Everyday” in the verses of the riffy opening track “Silence Kit”. But as much as the band calls back to music from the past, it never feels like pastiche or a game of spot-the-references. The band’s carefree swagger and nerdy mystique is like an overpowering spice that makes everything sound exactly like Pavement. The shambling style also serves as a cover for Malkmus’s remarkable craft and ambition as a songwriter. It’s all right there, in every song, but it’s all so casual it never feels like they’re showing off. The beat goes slack, Malkmus’s voice goes flat, and it’s all just sleight of hand to distract you from their magic trick.
- To understand the role Pavement played in the transition from punk fury to the open-endedness of indie rock, let’s go back to a story from singer Stephen Malkmus’ high-school band, Straw Dogs. This was Stockton, California, 1983: The Dogs are backstage at the Fremont Labor Lodge getting ready to open for Black Flag. Malkmus is 16. Good student, varsity tennis player, a little willowy. And there’s Henry Rollins—penetrating, warrior-like Henry Rollins—pacing back and forth in front of him, squeezing a cue ball. That’s punk, Malkmus thought. And I’m not. There’s plenty of dissonance on Slanted and Enchanted (“No Life Singed Her”, “Conduit For Sale!”). But where the noise of punk always felt in service of tearing down what’d been there before and building the world anew, Pavement used it as a means of romantic retreat, like the hiss of the ocean (“In the Mouth a Desert”) or muffled whispers under heavy blankets (“Perfume-V”). You could disappear into these tracks, and it often sounded like Malkmus had—boyishly voicing his yearnings through streams of words whose imprecision captured the feelings behind them better and more honestly than precision ever could (“Trigger Cut”’s “Lies and betrayals/Fruit-covered nails/Electricity and lust”). The album’s title, suggested by Malkmus’ college friend and late Silver Jews vocalist, David Berman, was a riff on a line from Emily Dickinson, whose precious-but-obscure poetry served as a kind of ancestral altar at which the music could be set: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” Even in the midst of bands like Nirvana and Sonic Youth, Pavement’s conversion of noise into pop—complete with prom-ready ballads (“Here”) and sweet sha-la-las (“Trigger Cut”)—felt both special and rare, a conversion of post-punk’s aversion to the obvious into songs you could put on mixtapes for a crush. Here, divisions between the intensity of punk and accessibility of classic rock seemed less important, ditto what it meant to be a heart-throb or an outcast, a jock or a nerd (Malkmus was arguably both). That the band never seemed like they were trying too hard made them both a sign of their slacker times but also a welcoming presence after an era of New Wave haircuts and cue-ball-squeezing powerlifters and other supposedly fresh riffs on the same old rock ’n’ roll preening. Listen under the feedback: They’re writing love letters.
Albums
- 1995
Music Videos
- 2022
- 2022
- 1994
Artist Playlists
- Indie guitar rock heroes with a ‘90s lo-fi slacker aesthetic.
- Spotlighting the rock grooves that caught the ear of Stephen Malkmus and company.
- These slacker indie icons try harder than you might think.
- This is what moved the men who put lo-fi indie on everyone's radar.
More To Hear
- Strombo delves into how the internet changed ’90s indiemusic.
- Strombo reflects back to 1995 when ’90s indie had its peak.
- Strombo digs into the scenes and cities that created ’90sindie.
- Strombo talks with the creators of the ’90s indie sound.
- Strombo digs into the ’90s indie sound and ethos.
About Pavement
If the indie-rock boom of the early '90s has a boy band, it’s Pavement: The sweet melodies, the carefree delivery, they way they can be the smartest guys in the room without making a point of it. At a time when some of their post-punk peers were still waging musical revolution, they embraced the rosy warmth of classic rock (Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain), and even at their most challenging (Westing (By Musket and Sextant, the stoned sprawl of Wowee Zowee) were more playful than rebellious, the sound of collegiate guys who liked sports and poetry in equal measure, who were always interesting but never pretentious. Courtney Love once described their frontman, Steve Malkmus, as “the Grace Kelly of indie rock”—an invocation not only of the band’s charm, but their poise and effortlessness. Pavement weren’t naive. But they sounded like winners without even playing the game. Their early music (1992’s Slanted and Enchanted in particular) summarized the best of ‘80s underground rock (the poetry of R.E.M., noise of Sonic Youth, sloppiness of The Replacements) while adding their own sweet-and-sour essence, turning out songs that transformed oblique poetry and fragmented of noise into lighters-up anthems (“In the Mouth a Desert,” “Trigger Cut”). Malkmus once joked that he realized he’d never be a real punk when he saw Henry Rollins of Black Flag squeeze a cue ball as a pre-show warmup. But even as their sound mellowed, the band retained an irreverence, delivering their grandest music—“Grounded,” “Type Slowly,” “The Hexx”—with a looseness that made them look humble: Not rock gods, but regular dudes you kinda wanted to root for. The band broke up after 1999’s Terror Twilight, reforming in 2010 and sporadically since.
- ORIGIN
- Stockton, CA, United States
- FORMED
- 1989
- GENRE
- Alternative