Brighten The Corners

Certain Songs #1498: Pavement – “Fin”

April 1, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Brighten The Corners
Year: 1997

“No more absolutes”

It was so subtle that I literally didn’t realize it until the morning I’m writing this, but Pavement had at least one long Stephen Malkmus guitar jam near the end of every album from Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain forward.

Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain had “Fillmore Jive” closing it off, but both Wowee Zowee and Terror Twilight stuck their long jams as the penultimate tunes, the former’s “Half a Canyon” somewhat obscured by the vocal shredding screams that accompanied it, and the latter’s “The Hexx” somewhat obscured for being near the end of Terror Twilight.

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!!