Pavement - Crooked Rain,Crooked Rain

Fri 3rd Dec, 2004 in Music Reviews

The early ‘90s were a time when glam rock was dead, grunge was all the rage, and DIYers were championed. No one wanted to hear two-minute guitar solos played by overzealous music virtuosos. Or wanted to see pyrotechnics while men in spray-on jeans strutted around the stage. People wanted easy, uncomplicated, uplifting music to go to the skate-park to. So the gods sent down Pavement.

The five piece’s sophomore effort Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain is fractured, light, and loose, the quintessential slacker rock album. Much like the sleeve artwork, Pavement were happy to cut and paste random fragments together, doodle all over the page, try the ridiculous. And yet it is this very homemade, anyone-can-do-it ethos which makes the album so worthwhile. It’s like your mates got together one summer afternoon and decided to record some music.

Silence Kit opens the album with spasmodic guitar stutters before singer Stephen Malkmus begins his cracking falsetto. The band’s loose, unaffected vocal stylings were refreshing from perhaps the note-perfect bleatings of rock gods past at the time. It’s this almost non-singing which is so endearing.

Stop Breathin is one of the album’s quieter moments, with plaintive guitar and a lonely voice which wanders aimlessly before the desperate request: ‘Stop breathin for me now’, and a launch into the most epic of slacker rock jazz-like freak out moments. Before you’ve got time to recover Cut Your Hair blasts on straight after, all ‘ooh-ooh’s and indie guitars which launched a thousand imitators.

The awkwardly sexy swagger of New Ark Wilder languidly wraps itself around your headspace, like that kid you knew in school who liked to build model ships and glanced at you nervously from the corner of their eye as you walked past. Wispy sighs of ‘So bad’ hang in the air like mist, and it’s a rather delicate affair.

Which is not the case with follower Unfair. Almost as if the band became too self-conscious about being sensitive young men, they set out to prove otherwise with a short blast of crunchy guitars and skinny boys maniacally screaming. And it works, momentarily. But then Gold Soundz saunters in.

Gold Soundz is the perfect embodiment of lazy summers listening to the radio, sucking on ice blocks, skulking around parks, just because you’re young and bored and you can. The lilting guitar and carefree vocals of Malkmus reflect a total innocence and vulnerability that was the total antithesis of cock-rock posturing, and people love them for it.

Pavement let you know that you didn’t have to be able to pull off Van Halen licks, or look good in spandex, or even be particularly cool. It was okay to be that socially inept kid down the back of the classroom drawing aliens, because they were that kid, too. Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain took the plight of the indie kids just doing their thing to the world, soundtracking a thousand summers.