Pavement

The widespread acclaim earned by the debut "Slanted & Enchanted" had brought with it a whole series of inevitable consequences for Pavement. Starting with the realization that they were now genuinely a band, with all the meaning and commitments that came with it: the era of spartan demos, recorded almost as a joke on unlikely home mixers, had come to an end before Stephen Malkmus, Scott Kannberg and drummer Gary Young, from Stockton, California, even had time to notice. By the time the debut album hit stores, Pavement had already turned into a five-piece: Malkmus, who had in the meantime moved to the other side of the continent, to New York, had brought in do-it-all percussionist Bob Nastanovich and bassist Mark Ibold. And so, all of a sudden, every piece was in place. The release of "Slanted & Enchanted" on the rapidly rising Matador was followed, still in 1992, by a long European and American tour supporting the undisputed kings of indie rock, Sonic Youth. A tour that, worth remembering, also touched Italy with dates in Milan, Cesena, Pisa and Rome. All of this within a handful of months, carried off with that slightly dazed, slightly sardonic air of someone who's there by chance – an attitude Stephen Malkmus would never quite shed, not even in hindsight, once the brief parabola of the "sidewalks" had run its course.

One way or another, after the release of the first album, expectations had built up around the five of them that the second act would inevitably have to confirm: "What had started as the experimental recording of a fake band," Malkmus once said, "had turned into a full-time job." A follow-up had to be put together, and Pavement didn't take long to respond in kind, despite the obstacles that cropped up right from the start.

The album, in fact, was supposed to be born and recorded at the home of drummer Gary Young, who had turned part of his California house into a makeshift recording studio. Things didn't go that way. Young, already responsible for a few bizarre stunts during the tour, and increasingly disengaged in his role as drummer, had become a loose cannon threatening to derail Pavement's progress. Inevitably, after another short tour of Australia and Northern Europe, by that spring he was no longer in the band. "At that point I didn't know whether Pavement would still exist," Kannberg writes in the liner notes for the deluxe edition of "Crooked Rain Crooked Rain," released in the autumn of 2004, exactly ten years after the original pressing, and rounded out not only by a lavish booklet packed with photographs, notes and previously unpublished reflections, but above all by two extra CDs that pair the twelve songs on the album with discarded tracks, b-sides and demo versions: L.A.'s Desert Origins is the name of this all-encompassing package for fanatics and collectors.

But back to the story. The solution to Young's absence arrived within a few weeks from the East Coast, New York to be precise, where Malkmus was based and had for some time been rehearsing new songs with a drummer named Steve West, with whom he had already shared time in Silver Jews. He was, of course, the fifth member of Pavement.

Alongside Kannberg, bassist Mark Ibold and percussionist Bob Nastanovich also made their way there. Malkmus himself organized everything: and indeed the studio ended up being a windowless room on the eighteenth floor of a New York building. Helping out the band was a sound engineer named Mark "Walleye" Venezia, who worked in an instrument shop on the fifteenth floor of the same building and supplied the band, under the table and on loan, with whatever gear they needed.

"Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain," released in February 1994, is a record whose sound is still tied to lo-fi philosophy (though "cleaner" than its predecessor), one in which rough, unruly rock and slacker vocals open up to pop melodies and more classic sonorities. Undoubtedly the most accessible chapter in Pavement's strange musical arc, probably their masterpiece; in any case, a world apart within the American quintet's admittedly brief discography. Everything surrounding it, however, remains unchanged: the resources available to them for the sophomore effort were better than before, but the deliberately impure sound, along with the baggy t-shirts and the look of overgrown college kids, and those songs teetering on the edge of perfection sitting right next to others stubbornly shambolic (much of Malkmus's lyrics were, and still are, essentially whatever came to mind, if not simply whatever he happened to write on the morning the vocal takes were due) all speak of a band that only ever wanted to mock the star system, or that simply loved and hated in equal measure the idea of breaking through in the music world, indulging that self-destructive streak that was always present, sometimes lurking in the background and elsewhere front and center, throughout the band's decade-long existence.

It's nihilism as an end in itself that serves as the screen behind which Pavement hides its exponentially growing commitment to its craft, becoming, probably against their own will, the voice of a generation about to bid farewell – within a couple of months, with the death of Kurt Cobain – to the primal rage of grunge. The prime example of this programmatic disengagement is "Range Life," an ode to the anti-star that not only chants like a mantra in its chorus "I want a range life, if I could settle down," but also namedrops, not without irony, several American rock acts of the era, starting with Smashing Pumpkins, drawing the ire of Billy Corgan, who would have Pavement dropped from that year's Lollapalooza and, it seems, held a grudge over it forever.

The record opens on the reluctant start of "Silence Kit," amid setup noise before Malkmus launches into a falsetto over which the song unfolds. The title has been the object of mishearings that persist to this day: the most common being "Silent Kid." A mystification spread by Stephen Malkmus himself, who in the deluxe edition handwrites that very version, we imagine purely for fun. The feeling, though, is that behind appearances nothing is really left to chance. The opening track truly gives the impression of being an introduction to a new micro-world that smells of a turning point, a place where the urges of the previous record find a self-satisfied landing spot: has this gotten serious? That's our answer.

But it isn't always like that: the rule is to throw the stone and hide the hand, blending mainstream sounds with decidedly underground moments. The crooked trajectory of "Elevate Me Later" distills carefreeness and melancholy with equal force, while the following "Stop Breathin'" is the album's first great peak: despite lyrics that mix civil war, volleyball and tennis, the song winds through a guitar arpeggio that, from the halfway point on, becomes the star of a stunning instrumental section in a crescendo of pathos that reaches its climax and then abruptly cuts off. Having shown off their (enormous) potential as songwriters, Pavement then unleash "Cut Your Hair," the most straightforwardly pop track in their entire decade-long output, a breezy, sunny song immediately picked up by MTV, helped along by a video in which the five of them give their worst best. The single would reach number 10 on the Billboard chart in America.

The shadowy atmospheres of "Newark Wilder" have Malkmus slipping into an unprecedented pulp persona, delivered through a chase of falsetto verses that follow the song's shifting moods. Lighting things back up is "Unfair," the nastiest track of the bunch: a little story about the rivalry between Southern and Northern California, painted in bold, almost hardcore strokes – and therefore thoroughly Californian – imagining the hills of Beverly Hills in flames and Pavement heading to Sacramento to catch "the last psychedelic band." It would be just another '90s anthem in the making, if it weren't immediately followed by "Gold Soundz," a gorgeous indie-rock gem about self-esteem, a topic of striking relevance right in the middle of the grunge era ("and you're the kind of girl I like/ because you're empty and I'm empty"). A subtle layer of melancholy runs through the track, giving it a timeless quality, a new classic that never stops casting its spell. Paired with the already mentioned "Stop Breathin'," it shows Pavement at their most inspired. "5 – 4 = Unity" is a jazzy digression that eases the tension and leads the listener into the reassuring melody of "Range Life," another meeting point between pop and rock in the vein of R.E.M., as well as an open jab at anyone in the music world bold enough to take themselves too seriously.

There's a lot of Lou Reed in the twilit, graceful arc of "Heaven Is A Truck", just as it's the Fall who inspire "Hit The Plain Down", a hallucinatory, ungainly rock track penned by Spiral Stairs. It's the grotesque handled in Pavement fashion, absurdity carried aloft in triumph. As for the closing "Fillmore Jive", it's a belated meditation on the state of music and the role of criticism, doled out over an introverted, listless track marked by a noise-laden finale: a crooked farewell before the curtain falls on what, beneath its deceptive surface, is a work that's perfect in its stubborn imperfection — a bona fide masterpiece of American rock.

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30/03/2014