Archives for March 2019

Certain Songs #1497: Pavement – “Starlings of the Slipstream”

March 31, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Brighten The Corners
Year: 1997

“Darlings on the split screen”

We’ve already discussed the circumstances under which I didn’t get to see Pavement play Lollapalooza in 1994 — Billy Corgan backlash for “Range Life” — but during that post I neglected to mention that I also somehow totally missed seeing them on the Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain tour not once but twice, though there were mitigating circumstances.

I moved from Fresno to the Bay Area in June of 1994, and because of that, I missed them at the Great American Music Hall in April of 1994 — I was basically living on savings, credit cards and unemployment checks at that point — and then I missed them in Fresno in September, 1994. I’m pretty sure I didn’t even know about that Fresno show until after it happened.

Certain Songs #1496: Pavement – “We Are Underused”

March 30, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Brighten The Corners
Year: 1997

It wasn’t anything new for Pavement, but a good chunk of the best songs on Brighten The Corners started off in one place and ended in a completely different place, so if you didn’t like the relatively quiet beginnings and/or slow tempos, if you had any kind of patience at all, songs like “Transport Is Arranged,” “Old To Begin” and “Type Slowly” totally and completely paid off by their ends.

But probably no song had a weirder journey that “We Are Underused,” which I think is both a generational observation as well as a song about accepting that you’re aging. Alternating stop-and-go verses with anthemic choruses, “We Are Underused” ends up a long way from the lone harpsichord (I think) that opens it.

Certain Songs #1495: Pavement – “Shady Lane / J vs S”

March 29, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Brighten The Corners
Year: 1997

“You’ve been chosen as an extra in the movie adaptation of the sequel to your life”

Two decades after the fact, the conventional wisdom seems to be that Slanted and Enchanted is a low-fi milestone; Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain a classic-rock masterpiece; Wowee Zowie is too weird not to be great, but after that, forget about it.

WRONG!!

Certain Songs #1494: Pavement – “Painted Soldiers”

March 28, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Brain Candy Original Soundtrack
Year: 1996

“All my soldiers are painted”

For reasons that I have no idea what they are to this day, I never really paid any attention to The Kids in the Hall when they were a thing — possibly because they were on the paywalled HBO — though I’ve really enjoyed a lot of their work since, especially Dave Foley in Newsradio and Color Me Obsessed, Scott Thompson in The Larry Sanders Show and Mark McKinney in Slings and Arrows and Superstore. Probably the other two guys, as well.

But of course, all of that happened after their 1996 film, Brain Candy, which was actually so far off of my radar that I didn’t even know that Pavement had contributed a song to it until I got the Wowee Zowee: Sordid Sentinels Edition in 2006.

Certain Songs #1493: Pavement – “Grave Architecture”

March 27, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Wowee Zowee
Year: 1995

“It takes a lot”

Yet another Wowee Zowee song with a weird structure and cryptic lyrics — which start with a disarmingly friendly Stephen Malkmus asking us to “come on in –“Grave Architecture” ended up grabbing me for a pretty weird reason, even for me: the rhythm guitar on the choruses (I guess) reminded me of some the mid-1960s Rolling Stones produced by Andrew Loog Oldham, circa The Rolling Stones Now!, Out of Our Heads or Aftermath

Certain Songs #1492: Pavement – “Grounded”

March 26, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Wowee Zowee
Year: 1995

“Boys are dying on these … streets”

While I was doing research on Wowee Zowee, I saw more than one comparison to The Beatles, that eclectic follow up to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band that also confused the hell out of people when it came out, and is now held up as a precursor to sprawling experimental indie rock albums like Wowee Zowee.

And that does make some sense. While the other four Pavement albums tapped out between 11-14 songs, Wowee Zowee came in at a massive 18 songs, and was wildly divergent from track to track, even for a band that stuck a 5/4 “jazz” workout in between a pair of folk-rock singles, so it never quite got the momentum the previous two records ended up with.

Certain Songs #1491: Pavement – “We Dance”

March 25, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Wowee Zowee
Year: 1995

Check that expiration date, man

It was March of 1995, and I was living in Oakland and flying down to L.A. to visit Rox, who was living on an apartment on Hollywood Blvd. And, of course, during that spring/summer, there was always loads of CD shopping, as there was still a plethora of what we used to call “record stores” in Hollywood.

It was during one of those trips where I bought the first taste of the follow-up to Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, the Rattled by La Rush EP. And I was puzzled: unlike the three singles from Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain — “Cut Your Hair,” “Gold Soundz” and “Range Life” — for those of you keeping score at home, “Rattled by The Rush” was far less pop and far more difficult, and as such was the perfect lead single for Wowee Zowee, perhaps the most difficult of all of the difficult third albums ever released.

Certain Songs #1490: Pavement – “Range Life”

March 24, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain
Year: 1994

“I/they don’t have no function”

It’s kinda funny how the most controversial song on Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain was basically a country-rock cruiser, and that the controversy wasn’t surrounding the fact that the music was miles and miles away from the punky fuzzouts they’d done on Slanted and Enchanted, but rather a throwaway punch-up joke that was taken too far seriously by its target.

Which is too bad, because that controversy kinda overshadowed what was perhaps the sharpest set of lyrics on the entire album — which is saying something — that contrast some hoary rock ‘n’ roll tropes with the desire to have some stability in life.

Certain Songs #1489: Pavement – “Gold Soundz”

March 23, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain
Year: 1994

“So drunk in the August sun”

I’ve never owned Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain on vinyl, but how much fun would it have been to be able to turn the record and have a second to recover from the frenzy of “Unfair” before the gorgeous opening of “Gold Soundz” kicks in. Instead, on the CD, it’s weirdly jarring, like if you had one of those multi-disc carousel changers and it somehow started playing a totally different CD.

Certain Songs #1488: Pavement – “Unfair”

March 22, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain
Year: 1994

“The last psychedelic band from Sacto, Northern Cal!”

Somehow, despite all of the stone classics surrounding it, “Unfair” turned out to be my favorite song from Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain — meaning that it’s my favorite Pavement song, period — as it’s a near-perfect combination of screeching rage, wild guitars, hilarious lyrics and a candy-sweet melody.

To to be honest, melody does take a bit of a backset in this case, but not so much that they don’t get away with producing a song that doesn’t have any chorus at all. Instead, “Unfair” starts at about an intensity level of 9.5 and ends up going to 11. At least.