From the Dec 25 – Dec 31, 2002 issue

Music

Pavement Is Forever

Slanted and Re-Enchanted

by Sean Nelson

You know you're an old wretch when you can honestly say that your favorite record of the year came out a decade ago. So while it would be convenient for me (old wretch that I am) to say that the reissued edition of Pavement's 1992 debut LP, Slanted and Enchanted--"Luxe and Reduxe," with more than 30 bonus tracks, two live shows, and a big old fancy booklet--was the best thing that came out in 2002, I can't quite bring myself to say it. It's not even my favorite Pavement record, except when I'm listening to it. Because every Pavement record is my favorite Pavement record when I'm listening to it. And in that sense, Slanted and Enchanted is definitely the best album of the year, but only insofar as every Pavement album is the best album of every year, in addition to being the best Pavement album of all time, when you're actually listening to it. Or thinking about it. Or writing an article about Pavement, a band which broke up two years ago but which one still finds oneself defending and discussing, ad ridiculorum, with anyone who will listen. This is because Pavement was the best band ever. I can't prove it, but that doesn't mean it isn't true.

I don't mean that Pavement was better than the Beatles. I simply mean that they were one of those bands that can make you forget the Beatles, if only momentarily, when you submit to their perfectly formed little universe. Despite what those people who all pretend to only like Slay Tracks will tell you, each Pavement album built on the last as the songwriting ambitions of Stephen Malkmus and Spiral Stairs developed. In addition to growing further and further away from the shambolic vibe of their earliest work, the band also got better and better with each passing album. And frankly, now that they're broken up, they're better than ever. There is a frame around Pavement now, which makes it all the more tempting to confer all kinds of historical magnanimity on what was essentially a holy goof of an art project which happened miraculously to coincide with a freakish moment in our recent cultural past wherein being sloppy and "bad" and elitist and contrary actually made you famous.

Slanted and Enchanted (still the best album title of all time; second only to Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain on the list of best Pavement album titles of all time) still sounds like it did then: fucked-up, fuzzed out, stumbling, epic, inscrutable, untenable, the rhyme animal. But it does not sound weird. It's hard and maybe important to remember that when it came out, it sounded like nothing. People said it sounded like the Fall and the Velvet Underground, but it doesn't, really. It sounds like a better version of what limitless bands tried to sound like for years to come. It's the face that launched a thousand shits (to paraphrase one of them, the great Revolutionary Hydra, a band it would be hard to imagine existing without the Pavement precedent). Putting the record on again was pure pleasure, not only because it made me put on all the Pavement records again--I do that every few months anyway--but because it reminded me that Slow Century, the Pavement DVD, also came out this year, and that it is an amazing document of videos, shows, and history, and that I could watch it whenever I wanted to pretend that my favorite band of the last 10 years never broke up. Sentimental? Perhaps. But then again, fuck you.

The First 10 Best Pavement Lines I Could Think of off the Top of My Head (not to be confused with "The Top 10 Pavement Lines," because no such list can be made): 1. "I could trickle, I could flood." ("Transport Is Arranged")

2. "Check that expiration date, man, it's later than you think." ("We Dance")

3. "Open call for prison architects" ("Fin")

4. "Between here and there is better than either here or there!" ("Conduit for Sale")

5. "Dad, they broke me." ("Stop Breathing")

6. "So why's he got a horse's body?" ("Westy Can Drum")

7 "There's no culture, there's no spies." ("Two States")

8. "The aftermath is steep." ("Cream of Gold")

9. "I'm too much, I'm too much comforted here." ("Father to a Sister of Thought")

10. "Their throats are filled with--" ("Fillmore Jive")

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