Sound Advice #4:
Pavement – Slanted and Enchanted (1992)
When I was at university, I took a module focusing on the
work of writers who lived during the reign of the British Empire, such as
Rudyard Kipling. I remember very little about what we studied, but I do
remember thinking that the course name, ‘Ripping Yarns: Fictions of Empire,
1880-1924’, would have made a fantastic title for a Pavement album. They’d
already split up by then, of course.
1992: I’d already decided I was a Pavement fan before I’d
really heard any of their music. I’d caught five-second snippets of songs such
as ‘Trigger Cut’ and ‘Texas Never Whispers’ on the indie chart of the ITV Chart
Show back in 1992 (they hadn’t made a video for either track so those few
seconds were all the programme played), which I thought sounded great –
melodic, chaotic, laid back and yet also strangely focused.
In press interviews, they came across as quirky, without it
ever feeling forced. They had not one but two drummers, one of whom (Gary
Young) displayed a particularly individual brand of eccentricism, ranging from
performing handstands onstage or clucking like a chicken mid-show to handing
out mashed potato or strands of cold spaghetti to bemused punters as they came
through the doors.
Seriously, what was not to like? They sounded fun, they
sounded intriguing and, to their credit, they didn’t seem the slightest bit
interested in fitting into any particular scene.
I finally heard a Pavement song in full (this is
pre-YouTube, remember) when I bought ‘Slanted and Enchanted’ in early 1993,
roughly a year after its release. For a 13-year-old to spend around £13-£14 of
my pocket money (remember how expensive CDs were in the early 90s?) on an album
by a band of which I’d only heard a combined total of 10 seconds, this was
obviously a massive gamble, but definitely one that paid off.
I was blown away on first listen. For someone more
accustomed at the time to hearing polished, highly produced albums such as ‘Nevermind’,
‘Ten’ or ‘Automatic for the People’, it was something of a revelation to hear a
record so wilfully raw and rough around the edges, where distorted, buzzing
guitars came close to drowning out Stephen Malkmus’s gloriously wry vocals (I
always imagined he sang with one eyebrow raised) and the drums threatened to
break free from the song they were supposed to be holding together. Sometimes
capturing the true essence of a song is more important than capturing the most
technically proficient version.
The songs themselves were wonderful, of course (and still
are). ‘Summer Babe’, ‘Trigger Cut’ and (my personal favourite) ‘Perfume-V’ should
by rights be permanent staples of any definitive alternative playlist in the
same way seminal classics such as ‘Touch Me I’m Sick’ and ‘Freak Scene’ already
are.
The band’s love of English post-punk and indie is evident on
the Fall-esque ‘Two States’ and ‘Conduit For Sale!’, while tracks such as ‘In
The Mouth A Desert’, ‘Loretta’s Scars’, ‘Our Singer’ and even the
country-tinged ‘Zurich Is Stained’ bring to mind The Wedding Present (it’s easy
to image David Gedge singing all of them). ‘Chesley’s Little Wrists’ manages to
channel the spirit of Gang of Four over frenetic free jazz rhythms, while the
gorgeously world-weary ‘Here’ could loosely be described as the ‘ballad’ of the
album (it was later covered by Tindersticks).
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| The original album cover appropriated for 'Slanted and Enchanted' |
Also striking was the artwork. The band name and album title
were seemingly painted in correction fluid over the existing cover of a piano
music record from the 1960s, while the inside was a DIY collage of apparently random
photos (with the exception of shots of the three band members involved in the
recording) and pages torn from notebooks, alongside the largely nonsensical
lyrics to 10 of the album’s 14 songs, lovingly scrawled in what I assume to be
Malkmus’s handwriting.
This, coupled with the lo-fi nature of the music, reinforced
the notion that anyone could have a go at doing this: you didn’t need a studio
the size of the Starship Enterprise and you didn’t need to be friends with a graphic
designer – all you needed were ideas and enthusiasm, and Pavement evidently had
both in abundance. And anyway, isn’t the idea just as important as the realisation
when it comes to art?
Although I remain a huge fan, for me, Pavement never quite managed
to match the sheer experimental playfulness of ‘Slanted and Enchanted’
(although 1995’s ‘Wowee Zowee’ came pretty close). Follow up ‘Crooked Rain,
Crooked Rain’, while obviously great, always felt a little restrained compared
to its predecessor.
‘Slanted and Enchanted’ will be a quarter of a century old
next year, a prospect which is equally incredible and terrifying. Of all the
albums I’ve owned in that time, I’ve probably listened to this one more than
any other (twice in the last two days alone).
It’s really no exaggeration to say that the day I grow tired
of this record is the day I stop believing in the power of music.
