Matador
Produced by Pavement
Released: February 1994
TRACKLISTING
01 Silence Kid
02 Elevate Me Later
03 Stop Breathin’
04 Cut Your Hair
05 Newark Wilder
06 Unfair
07 Gold Soundz
08 5-4=Unity
09 Range Life
10 Heaven Is a Truck
11 Hit the Plane Down
12 Fillmore Jive
The cut from Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, the inspired second album from American rockers Pavement, which hovers in the mainstream music consciousness, is ‘Range Life’. In it the band’s songwriter, Stephen Malkmus, imagines life amid the front line of alterative rock’s then new superstars. ‘Out on tour with the Smashing Pumpkins/Nature kids, they don’t have no function,’ the lanky vocalist declares over a golden hued country-rock jam. ‘The Stone Temple Pilots, they’re elegant bachelors/They’re foxy to me, are they foxy to you?’ It’s snarky, but glancing – Malkmus would diffidently claim it was written from the viewpoint of an ageing hippy, but it was enough to infuriate Smashing Pumpkins’ dictator Billy Corgan, who was unhappy about subsequently sharing a stage with the Californian five-piece.
Yet on the same song, less than 60 seconds earlier, there’s a remarkable verse that encapsulates the lonely beauty and uncertain possibilities of teenage life: ‘Out on my skateboard, the night is just hummin’/And the gum smacks are the pulse that I’ll follow, if my walkman fades/But I’ve got absolutely no-one, no-one but myself to blame’. That contrast, and the way that the playfully spiky digs are recalled and the transcendent verse is buried, is typical of Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. It’s an album that has had to survive all manner of generational statements tied to the mid-1990s before it could shine through as a sustained piece of songwriting that reveals more with each listen.
The band had been formed in 1989 in the central Californian city of Stockton, by teenage friends Malkmus and Scott Kannberg, who originally envisaged Pavement as a studio project. They recorded lo-fi EPs in a local studio run by Gary Young, an older musician who became their decidedly eccentric first drummer. By 1992 bassist Mark Ibold and percussionist Bob Nastanovich had been added, and Pavement were touring their fuzzy and idiosyncratic debut album, Slanted & Enchanted. By 1993, after extensive international touring where Young’s loose playing and penchant for running around the stage mid-song had begun to grate on his bandmates, the drummer was replaced by Steve West as the sessions for this sophomore record began.
There was a noticeable change on the resulting record as well, with the affection of Malkmus and Kannberg for English post-punk provocateurs the Fall being replaced by an appreciation of R.E.M.’s early 1980s output. It’s not just the guitar sound – pure Peter Buck jangle – on the stirring ‘Gold Soundz’ that sells it, but the realisation that Malkmus’ lyrical outlook harbours a judicious eye. Like a young Michael Stipe, Malkmus is the all-American alien, alert to the friction within his culture but deeply connected to its tradition. His distaste for Los Angeles and its celebrity lifestyle – a repeat feature on the likes of ‘Elevate Me Later’ and ‘Unfair’ – was couched in postmodern satire, matching a surge of imagery to ringing classic rock on the former and blazing alternative licks for the latter.
Pavement assumed – and mastered – every style they approached on Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. They turned the dilapidated groove and sweet harmonies of ‘Cut Your Hair’ into an anthem – a song that almost made them into the stars the verses mock – while the fractured, tender track, ‘Stop Breathin’, circles unease until it offers a defiant send-off. For good measure they even put together a spectral jazz instrumental with ‘5-4=Unity’. On the six-minute epic final cut, ‘Fillmore Jive’, a drunken Malkmus makes outrageous demands and then passes out on a couch, dreaming of mods and rockers as his bandmates find an elegiac orbit and the singer views his own screening of Quadrophenia. The esoteric has rarely sounded so satisfying.