Speaking of nostalgia, allow me to begin this commemoration of the reunited Pavement by recounting a cherished, Pavement-scented memory from my past. This event occurred back in 1992, when Pavement were an underground band with deafening buzz and I was a young man entrenched in a musically discordant relationship: I liked everything (mostly noisy guitar bands) and he liked classical (mostly Bach). Despite his restricted musical diet, my snooty-music-loving dude wasn’t a prude, and watching him process records I obsessed over was fascinating. He accepted almost everything, expressed admiration for a few things (The Velvet Underground‘s “The Murder Mystery,” parts of XTC’s Skylarking and Camper Van Beethoven’s Key Lime Pie, the whole of My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless), and actively forbade only one thing ever, which he endured once in 1992 and never again. This forbidden thing: “Summer Babe (Winter Version),” the lead track on Slanted and Enchanted, Pavement’s 1992 debut LP, which stumbled from our speakers in all its careless, corroded glory and made my guy almost nauseated. “These people have a recording contract?” he asked, for real. “This should not be considered music.”
I attempted to explain, something along the lines of “You know how sunsets are so beautiful that even a blurry, off-center photo of a sunset is beautiful? That’s Pavement, writing songs so gorgeous they can play them as sloppily as they want and not ruin the beauty.” He wasn’t buying it, which is fair. Explaining a band to someone is usually about as successful as explaining a joke, plus that’s why God made headphones. And thank God, because I dove into the rust-colored swamp of Slanted and Enchanted with a passion commensurate with my guy’s revulsion.
The buzz that preceded Slanted and Enchanted shouldn’t be undersold. After Nevermind, the search for the next Nirvana turned record execs into bounty hunters and amplified all buzz tenfold. But all that buzz was justified by the songs on Slanted and Enchanted, which quickly revealed itself as a ramshackle masterwork, an adamantly lo-fi pastiche of arty noise, sunny melody, and ripped-off Fall riffs executed with dubious musicianship and laced with idiosyncratic lyricism. “Lies and betrayals/Fruit-covered nails/Electricity and lust” goes the first line of the second song, the gloriously shambling “Trigger Cut,” which strings together a song’s worth of oddly beguiling imagery before climaxing with a chorus of sha-la-las so lovely and funny you simultaneously laugh and blush. Which brings up what would become Pavement’s primary identifier once the “next Nirvana” hype was confounded by the strange fruits of Slanted: Irony™. But that trademark is too limited a word to sum up the wit at play in Pavement, suggesting simple bait and switch rather than layered statements and musical jokes that give you goose bumps.
Of course, Slanted and Enchanted was just the start of the story. Pavement’s 1994 follow-up Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain reintroduced Slanted‘s lo-fi multitrackers as a living, breathing band, captured at its friendliest and most melodic. (The great “Cut Your Hair” was the closest Pavement ever got to a hit song, while the greater “Gold Soundz” was the closest they ever got to a mid-’80s Cure cover.) Things got weird with 1995’s Wowee Zowee, a sprawling 18-track tour of what sounded like every musical idea the band was entertaining at the time, from elegiac folk-rock (“We Dance”) and jokey junk-punk (“Best Friend’s Arm”) to gorgeous stoner jams (“Grounded”) and pristine slices of their classic lackadaisical majesty (“Rattled by the Rush,” “AT&T”). Greeted with restrained appreciation upon its release, Wowee Zowee has only grown in stature, with many fans cherishing it as “the most Pavement-y Pavement album” and band leader Stephen Malkmus chalking up the whole Wowee Zowee experience to excessive pot smoking.
Then came the (relatively) mature years, with 1997’s Brighten the Corners honing the excesses of Wowee Zowee into a classically structured rock album loaded with some of the bands greatest tracks (“Stereo,” “Shady Lane,” “Embassy Row,” “Starlings of the Slipstream,” the Spiral Stairs–led “Date with IKEA”), and 1999’s Terror Twilight bringing the Pavement experiment to a fittingly melodic close, with a record that sounds like a Malkmus solo album, only way better than any of the actual Malkmus solo albums to come. Not long after the tour for Terror Twilight, Pavement broke up, Mr. Bach Lover and I broke up, and we all went our separate ways.
Now it’s 2010, and I’m once again entrenched in a relationship with someone who doesn’t share my appreciation of Pavement, who have regrouped in full (including hilarious extra guy/spirit animal Bob Nastanovich) for a reunion tour. The Northwest got an early peek of the fruits of this reunion at this spring’s Sasquatch! Festival, where the freshly reunited Pavement filled a headlining slot with two hours of loving sloppiness. “They get away with it not just because nostalgia has made them untouchable, but because the songs are just so damn good,” wrote Stranger music editor Eric Grandy from the scene, reiterating my 18-years-earlier defense of the band to my Bach-loving boyfriend and filling me with joy. Truly, the only way the Pavement reunion could soil the band’s legacy is if the shows were too tidy and professional, with studious retreads of the band’s shambling recordings and a general vibe of former Pavement members performing as a Pavement tribute band rather than Pavement reborn. The Sasquatch! show suggested that the reunion was exactly what I hoped it would be: the guys of Pavement coming together with all their sloppy, harmonious idiosyncrasies to bang their way through the beloved Pavement songbook.
Reports from the road remain heartening, citing a career-spanning set ranging from early EP treats to Terror Twilight highlights (and occasionally featuring the entirety of Slanted and Enchanted) and a band with a tangible, messy chemistry. “It was the kind of show that a fan expected in the late 1990s but the band, publicly splintering by the minute, couldn’t quite manage,” wrote the Los Angeles Times of Pavement’s April show in Pomona, praising the 31-song set list and the “low-end rumble from drummer Steve West and bassist Mark Ibold that sometimes teased at the edges of destruction.” Hot fucking damn—though it must be noted that aside from Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, Pavement have never made a crowd-pleasing gesture in their lives, and it’d be foolish to expect them to start now. Instead, I’m counting on a night of messy melody, cruddy noise, squirrelly beauty, aesthetic ambivalence, and inside jokes that make musical sense to outside ears—pure Pavement. 
Remember when they played Moe’s in 1997? That was a good time!
The last time I saw, Pavement, well it was really Stven Malkmus and the Jicks, was Bumbershoot 2003. It was a great set, but was unfortunately marred by some smooth talking DJ that ruined the beginning and end of the show. Alas.
F&(K these guys. They suck. Saw them at Sasquatch and was pissed I wasted my time to walk over to their stage. Pure crap-fest
@3 you could have walked away from the stage and kept your opinion to yourself…but alas it’s the internet and some anonymous asshole has to pipe up….
Clumsy, pointless, intellectually lazy, there-is-no-world-beyond-my-inarticulate-mumblings-and-trip-to-the-thrift-store hipster garbage.
Always has been. Always will be.
If you haven’t achieved one iota of emotional or intellectual growth since you were a college freshman in the mid-’90s, then Pavement’s your band!
@5 and yet if you read a malkmus interview he namedrops about 10 cool new bands. and if you can point me to a hipster thift store outside seattle that sold cool records in the 90s not named my aim is true or last splash the dashes can apply. and not to be a english student on you, but wouldn’t yr inability to articulate (for those unaware of pavement) what is meant by “clumsy, pointless, intellectually lazy” make you all those things? there is a reason the pen is mightier then the sword.
@6: A 44-year-old who still sits around namedropping “cool new bands” is exhibiting intellectual growth? How, exactly?
Not a thrift store for so-called “cool records.” A thrift store for stupid vintage shirts.
Clumsy… that would be the chord changes and melodic structures.
Pointless… pick any Malkmus lyric. Hermetically sealed, contextually ambivalent signposts of a homogeneous hipster culture.
Intellectually lazy… see your own post.
oh no, i’m trapped in the spider’s web of a post that was waiting to be profound.
huh. i’ve never heard the pavement song about cheap t-shirts. but since it is pavement, it’d probably be about how the co-option of underground culture has allowed any old person a message board to make them a signpost for irrational superstitions of a door they were never let into, right? it would suit what i am implying.
i could list the songs to show off their skill. but the point wouldn’t be the individual elements, more how they come together. and lyrical context is often in the hands of the listener i think. they can’t decide when you are listening to the albums.
i wasn’t implying he was growing, just implying that his “no world outside of his own world” thing contained a lot of bands. that he has played with and wants to share. but yeah, isn’t that what we are here for? learning about new art that will aid us in our growth as our ideas become more realistic and our own? so as not to be intellectually lazy? maybe?
is or was pavement on matador records?
matador?!?
Yes pavement is horrible, see sasquatch. I it was so bad it actually became hilarious watching all the hipsters try and act like they were enjoying it! worst band ever, they should go on tour with kid cudi, and give everyone the dose of crap that sasquatch had
@5: Its just music! It may be sloppy nonsense, and yeah, it takes me back to days past when I would be the first person to tell you I myself was intellectually lazy. Its not like they are on this tour saying “look how much we have grown to satisfy your need to validate your taste 15 years ago” If thats how you define yourself, stay home. You’re probably no fun anyway. I myself will be checking out for the evening and return to work Tuesday in all my intellectual glory.
I can’t wait.
I just got called “no fun” by some guy on the internet! This really is my lucky day!
Totally fun show.
d.p. : Who, in terms of musical acts, do you consider to be worthy? I’m genuinely curious.
Yeah, I’m one of those people that fell in love with Pavement in the 90’s and still highly regard (most) of their work. I can assure you I have emotionally and mentally grown significantly in the last 15+ years. It’s hard to say if I would like them today if hearing them for the first time, but seeing that my favorite contemporary band is the Black Lips, I think maybe yes.
No, it’s not intellectual and I don’t pretend it is. What I get out of rock and roll is much different that what I get out of, say, reading Zizek. I like my music to have the right balance of smart and stupid. If I want intellectualism I read a fucking book, but I stand behind the sincerity of my opening question.
I tried to like Pavement. I tried really hard. But after my 30th time through Slanted and Enchanted I came to the realization that it just wasn’t going to happen. If only Malkmus could sing. And write intelligible lyrics. And they could actually play their instruments.
RE: d.p. #14 (and others)
You should go play outside, Douche Potato.
In twenty years I’d expect the same reaction to Pavement that today’s kids have to Bob Dylan, except I doubt that Pavement will be remembered two decades down the road.
@19: I always thought of Pavement as more comparable to the Velvet Underground; people still listen to them 40+ years later.
Bhowie,
Žižek would have plenty to say about Pavement if he ever heard them, just as he has plenty to say about every artifact of high or low culture that crosses his path. Why wouldn’t you want to be aware of how your enjoyment of one filters through your enjoyment of the other?
I’m unable to play the “list” game. I don’t know a single person over 30 whose music tastes could be easily encapsulated by a genre label or a representative list of band names. Do you?
I listen to music that is fun and that is serious, that is wry and that is stirring, that is intense and that is subtle, that is adventurous and that is comforting. I listen to plenty of so-called “indie rock” and to plenty of bands you might abhor. I listen to more than a few bands that have toured with Pavement or with Stephen Malkmus.
In fact, my lasting enmity towards Malkmus stems from holding him responsible for making me think I didn’t like “indie rock.” All of the indie-rock people with whom I went to college were so sycophantic about Pavement — and I was so incapable of finding anything witty in Malkmus’s ramblings or interesting in the band’s dying-cat guitar strummings — that for years I shut myself off to anything the indie-rockers deigned to hype. It wasn’t until much later that I discovered the indie-rock canon is full of bands that aren’t so annoying!
If you went to school in the mid-1990s, there were essentially two groups of music obsessives: those who listened to Pavement and those whose palates were whet by Massive Attack. So it was fascinating, thirteen years later at the Gorge, to see Massive Attack achieve a spellbinding set of politically savvy, sexually raw, musically crackling, total sensory overload… just minutes after seeing Pavement limp through their hour of dated, drunken, aimless meanderings and finally confirm my incredulity of yesteryear!