Sometimes derided as merely their most commercial moments, Pavement’s second studio album - Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain - was the perfect record released at the perfect time.
Let’s get the important bit done first: Pavement are one of the most important, influential, and pioneering bands of the last fifty years. Their entire discography would be included in my desert island record box and I can’t think of another band with such a focused and genuinely inimitable discography. Over the next however-long you keep reading these articles and allowing us to write about records like this on a Sunday, we will talk about all of Pavement’s albums - as they are all utter belters - but this week we start back in early 1994 with the band’s second studio LP, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. Released as part of a long-standing partnership with indie titans Matador Records, it was a stylistic shift from their debut LP, Slanted and Enchanted, but a slow-moving evolution rather than any sort of hard turn. Original drummer Gary Young had left the band, and his replacement Steve West did add a certain metronomic energy that was essential to the knottier and more intricate arrangements that would follow. The production - produced by Pavement alongside Bryce Goggin at Random Falls Studios in NYC - is also really fantastic; a companion to their raw and fuzzy debut, but with so much more clarity and snap.
Stephen Malkmus’ writing is also some of his most effervescent, with riffs and hooks to pull you in and cryptic, surreal raillery that keeps you searching on repeat plays. The duality of the radio friendly crunch against themes of disillusionment and malaise is also fascinating. It is absolutely no wonder that Cut Your Hair became such a staple of college radio and MTV playlists. It is absolutely one of the most perfect singles anyone has ever released, but the anthemic yelps very thinly cover snide attacks on the increasing importance of image in the music industry. I mean, he sure was on the right side of history on that one!
“Pavement marry the lazy drawl of the American underground with the hooky smarts of classic rock. On Crooked Rain, they sound like slackers with soul.”
- Rolling Stone
Although the album would become - weirdly - one of the pallbearers of the slacker indie rock movement, it just has so much more than slack going on. Sonically there are gestures towards a more jangling pop sound of earlier decades, curious and avant little asides, warm alternative country hues and when they do keep it slack, well, no one ever got close to just how slack Pavement could get.
The delivery is always off-the-cuff, Malkmus in particular with such a deft touch to the absurd one liners and the seemingly carefree humour. Other people tried to sound like them, but no one ever really had the chemistry and the inventiveness that Pavement had. As a huge fan of everything they ever made, I have no way to really tell whether Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain is their best, worst or most enduring album; but it is an absolute classic either way and probably the album I have listened to most. It is both full of nostalgia for a different era of making (and releasing) music, but also sparkling and fresh thirty plus years after they made it.
So, did you ever see the drummer’s hair?
