Pavement’s Musique Concrete
The trouble with making ennui, emotionlessness, and cynicism the aesthetic center of your art is that it puts you in an immediate bind. If boredom is the proper intellectual response to the prevailing cultural or political climate, why create at all? Why get emotional about the fact that there’s nothing worth getting emotional about? And if cynicism marks the era, isn’t railing against it quaint and outdated? Such mental circles exemplify the Zen of Pavement, the members of which have nothing to say, find the kind of music they play pointless, and consider most of its practitioners frauds. It’s only rock ‘n’ roll, they say–and then let the phrase lie.
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Musically, the band’s solidly into the usual indie low-fi head trip: blurts of guitar noise, clattery drumming, coursing solos from the mysteriously named guitarist Spiral Stairs, and the conversational, singsong delivery of Steve Malkmus. The new Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain is the band’s second studio album. On their first, Slanted and Enchanted, they were rigorously obscurantist, the better to make it clear that nothing really mattered. The rather irritating twist to both albums, however, is that the band makes it clear that it can create music that matters when it wants to. It did so, somewhere between half- and whole- heartedly, with the stately march and burbly beauty that marked its 1992 single “Summer Babe.”
Screwin’ myself with my hand.
