Pavement
Slanted & Enchanted
Matador, 1992
Pinot noir tastes like horse piss, I've been told, to those who don't drink red. Try arguing that case at a wine club and you'd be out the door faster than a '79 Grange at half-price. Pop music isn't so different. Genres, and the ability to tell and traverse them, are an acquired taste. One of the most enduring mysteries to lovers of independent and avant-garde music is the failure of the mainstream to appreciate the sounds they hold so dear. "Why do people listen to Shannon Noll instead of The Drones?" they ask. Because most people haven't spent the last decade learning to drink red wine, is the obvious answer.
But there is another reason for the mainstream-independent divide, I think, that is more black-and-white. It has less to do with genre than production. When most listeners hear rough vocals or background noises in a song they think it's cheap. Real pop music is made in a studio, not in someone's garage. If there's anything worthwhile in that sort of music, they think, it'd have to be pretty amazing to break free from the awful cheapness it's mired in. Which is, of course, almost the exact opposite of how music fans like myself think. If there's anything decent on some pop star's album, it'd have to be the hardy little flower indeed to poke through the weeds of commercial interest blocking it from the sun.
So if that's the difference between "pop" and "indie", then what is it that makes people jump the fence? For me it was the Pixies. But for many others, especially in the US, it was Pavement. A few years ago, to mark the 10th anniversary of Slanted & Enchanted's release, critic and musician Chris Ott hand-wrote an essay for Pitchfork (who uploaded scans of the pages instead of retyping it) about the impact of hearing the record for the first time when he was 16. "It was a midway point between the sounds I dreamt of and the sounds I was capable of making... the walkie-talkie guitar production sounded like our garages and our basements," he wrote. Reading it makes me wonder about the teenagers out there now, and which albums they'll be writing columns about in ten years.
Chris Ott's review of Slanted & Enchanted is no longer available on the Pitchfork website, but he has very kindly given me permission to post a cut-down version of the text here. You'll have to imagine what it would have looked like as a hand-written essay.
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Pavement
Slanted & Enchanted: Luxe & Reduxe
Matador, 2002
1992: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Nirvana were passing out on magazine covers all over the world. Spin, the suburban town crier, passed to stranded youth the biggest news from a scene still directed in secret, in cities, by fanzines made on hijacked photocopiers. I was 16, learning to play drums in a basement band, every day after school, and thanks to Spin's sidebar annotation discovered a record that sounded almost as bad as the 4-track recordings we were making (Beat Happening’s 1985 cassette wasn’t much to aspire to – it sounded worse). Pavement’s Slanted & Enchanted was a midway point between the sounds I dreamt of and the sounds I was capable of making. It was as instructive as it was inspirational.
For music as cocky, atrocious and clever as Pavement’s to have come out of the amorphous, always dying world of American indie rock is really surprising, specifically the success of their 10” EP Perfect Sound Forever. Vinyl was just beginning the resurgence it would enjoy for the remainder of the decade; record store clerks and college radio DJs marveled that a 10” could be produced in 1991. Clothed in its obscure, messy (yes, Fall) sleeve, the EP sold out, prompting Spin to write it up alongside the pre-release cassette of Slanted & Enchanted that had everyone buzzing during the summer of 1991.
Nirvana were recording Nevermind. I was listening to the major-label debuts of Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr. and the Lemonheads, to the Blake Babies’ Sunburn and the Pixies’ Doolittle. All of them had been featured on MTV’s 120 Minutes. The Cure had gone to #3 in the US. Formerly independent UK bands like Ride, The Stone Roses and My Bloody Valentine were available in suburban malls. Pop music was overripe with new ideas. Something had to give.
It was obvious, and it was sort of a bummer. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” appeared on promotional compilation cassettes throughout the summer of 1991, and we blasted it in our parents’ cars with glee. In the fall, kids were playing Nevermind and Metallica back to back at parties, and they pretty much flowed together. Sure, Nirvana loved music – truly, madly, deeply – but they had no allure, no mystery. They were Buffalo Tom to The Jesus Lizard’s Dinosaur Jr., and their great rock music appealed to as many jocks as it did outcasts. I didn’t want to listen to songs kids were screaming at their “My parents are away” parties. I didn’t want to drink with those meatheads. I drank before school. There had to be a soundtrack for this.
The guitarist I was playing with every day went off to college in New York City, and in September 1992 sent me a 90-minute cassette that changed everything. The first side contained songs by Slint, Wire, Pere Ubu, and the Minutemen. The second side was Slanted & Enchanted. I hadn’t been able to get Pavement’s record at the mall, and the two times I’d gone record shopping in Boston, Newbury Comics was sold out, so I’d been waiting to hear it for about five months since its adoration in the pages of Spin.
The dead, thudding drums and walkie-talkie guitar production sounded like our garages, our basements and high school auditoriums: the secret reason Slanted & Enchanted rises above its production is the bass lines. Though they only feature on about half the songs, he - whether he knew it or not – put down one of very few modern recordings in which the instrument is used as it was designed: as the foundation of the song. The guitars are mixed either hard left and right or mono; in all cases, treble is kicked to the limit. The remastering for this edition adds some noticeable punch to the drum kit, but thankfully preserves the rest of the original sound, clarifying the tracks without isolating them in the mix. You think it’s easy, but you’re wrong.
The 14 classic Slanted & Enchanted tracks are here, from the hazy, lazy “Summer Babe”, its bass line like Mike Watt in slow-motion, to the late-night, recorded-direct poetry of “Our Singer”. There’s the CCR / R.E.M. hybrid “Zurich Is Stained”, the genius pre-Polvo guitar and chorus of “Perfume-V”, and of course, indie rock’s very own “Every Breath You Take”: “Here” (track 9, for those of us that put it on every mix tape).
The reissue boasts an hour and a half of extra material that tidily compiles the band’s post-Slanted activity, including the Watery, Domestic EP. The seven tracks recorded during the Watery sessions would merit a 10.0 as a standalone EP. Though the band was in chaos at the time, dealing with their infamously drunk and disorderly drummer Gary Young, they recorded 6 of their best songs. I’ve always said the best time in a band’s career is the moment they first perceive an audience, when they begin to take themselves not seriously, but as more than just a good time. “Texas Never Whispers”, “Greenlander” and “Frontwards” (featuring the career-making, signature lyric “I’ve got style, miles and miles / so much style that it’s wasted”) are as good as anything in the band’s decade-long catalog.
The previously unreleased material (almost all of which was available on suspiciously well-distributed bootlegs like Stuff Up The Cracks), offers some real gems. “Circa 1762” and “Kentucky Cocktail”, recorded for the much-admired John Peel program, nicely conclude the first wave of Pavement songwriting. Their rendition of “Secret Knowledge Of Backroads” - originally home-recorded by Malkmus and his roommate DC Berman (and available on The Silver Jews’ impossibly out-of-print Arizona Record) - is overwrought, and the loud/live version of “Here” is done more justice on disc two’s Brixton Academy recording. Their second Peel Session offered the hilarious, brief “Drunks With Guns” and unreal, effortless genius of “Ed Ames”. We also discover that “Wounded-Kite At :17” - the fadeout that follows “Trigger Cut” - is actually a snippet of an unreleased Slanted song “Nothing Ever Happens”, which I’d never seen on bootleg or heard until now, but this is no great tragedy.
In retrospect, it seems Slanted fortified and refocused the tired, exploited underground. It showed us that regardless of the suits and ties invading our world, there was plenty of room to operate beneath the mainstream radar, and moreover, there was plenty of new music to be made. It reminded us Sebadoh were still out there, fighting the good fight, and it made Matador the coolest label in America overnight. With only R.E.M. and Sebadoh as reference points for music like this, most liberal arts students (and those soon to join their ranks) were blown away by the obnoxious, up-front prose and blithe wordplay.
Also, it’s not like Pavement just ripped off The Fall. What is that? What, Malkmus talks in “Conduit For Sale”. Big deal. Mark E. Smith says Malkmus is driving around in his BMW, but ghoul, I gotta tell you: you can’t sing. SM can. Besides, they were dedicating songs to The Crucial Three on the Slanted tour. Did people not see the parallels with the artwork on Life’s Rich Pageant and Dead Letter Office, let alone the discography of fellow Californians Camper Van Beethoven? Why does it have to be about The Fall just because some critic wanted to prove he’d heard of them? Yes, they listened to The Fall, but they were as obviously indebted to numerous other groups. Pavement offered an inroad to namedrop important bands outside the tedious Big Black / Dinosaur Jr./ Next Nirvana comparisons of the late 80s and early 90s; critics should kiss the band’s ass for the variety of ways Pavement have allowed them to pontificate.
We all seem to have forgotten the buzzword Slacker (and here’s to that), so let’s stop here, and take a minute to observe its short-lived potency in the early-90s, when a vast majority of Pavement’s press crowned them kings of the shrugging-to-be-clever set. Their first bootleg, of the 1992 Brixton Academy show featured on disc two of Luxe & Reduxe, was titled Stray Slack, and it was widely rumored that the band were involved in its release. As late as 1994, the cover of Spin magazine read: “Pavement: Young, Gifted, and Slack.” Jim Greer, where are you now?
I think your red wine analogy is very apt. I often wonder what has inspired my interest in textural drone/noise music. I think living in close proximity to a major industrial site during my formative years, and having the constant rhythmic chugging of the machines in my ears, I found some kind of comfort in the harsh monotony. I remember first hearing something along these lines late at night on Radio National, during a severe bout of mid-teens Chicken Pox. I can't remember the name of the piece/artist, but it was the first time I was properly shocked by the (anti)musicality of something.
ReplyDeleteI imagine Pavement might have shocked me in the way you describe had I arrived a half-decade earlier. These are exciting moments indeed.
nice
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