Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain

Pavement

album cover

Rock Geekdom, Immortalized

There were certain things you had to do to appear cool in the alternative rock scene of the 1990s. You had to maintain the look of above-it-all contempt, a slacker aloofness that actually took some practice to pull off. You had to tromp around in eroded Doc Martens, proffering an elitist's disdain for corporate rock (and the mindless lemmings who worshipped it).

On his band Pavement's second full-length outing, songwriter and singer Stephen Malkmus took this contempt to a new level, made it a part of his art. Sounding less interested in communicating with an audience than gossiping with a few friends, Malkmus devoted long stretches of his songs to stream-of-consciousness chatter. His lyrics can seem like a sustained sneer, with puzzling non sequiturs and insider putdowns interrupted every so often by startlingly cogent insights.

Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, Malkmus's magnum opus, is a cockeyed song cycle about rock geekdom. It starts with a disaffected suburban youth wanting to make some noise in his rec room. From there it looks at fandom and its discontents ("Cut Your Hair"), lampoons then-huge arena powerhouses Stone Temple Pilots and Smashing Pumpkins ("Range Life"), and parodies rock's backstage excesses ("They pull out their plugs and they snort up their drugs," goes one line on the withering "Fillmore Jive").

Malkmus talk-sings like a suburban rock gawker, in spasms of unruly off-keyness. He plays with the same abandon, and that's one reason Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain endures—this at times savage attack represents a pinnacle of alt-rock guitar. The guitars communicate in a language of sideways lurches and dorky skinned-knee dissonances, and their (inevitable) collisions feel too harrowing to have been planned. Primitive and perfectly apt, they're the skronks an Indie Kid might come up with minutes after getting his first guitar, and they keep Pavement away from anything remotely resembling holier-than-thou rock-star posturing.

Genre: Rock
Released: 1994, Matador
Key Tracks: "Cut Your Hair," "Silence Kit," "Elevate Me Later"
Catalog Choice: Slanted and Enchanted
Next Stop: Sonic Youth: Goo
Book Page: 587

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Comments:

#1 from Marc Thurman, Austin, Texas - 12/14/2008 7:55

Well, because it is a recording by the band Pavement. A band that set their own goals and arrived at those goals by tilling new paths in popular music. In a time of monster artist’s like Nirvana, Pearl jam and the like, Pavement slowly subverted the existing music scene with their peerless “brat-rock”. Although, in my opinion, I world have chosen “Slanted and Enchanted”, for reasons I won’t even start to explore, I have to give it up to Mr. Moon for the inclusion of the Artists Pavement.

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