Pavement circa 1994 Photo: Gail Butensky
I knew Pavement had entered the public consciousness when a soundalike version of their song ‘Cut Your Hair’ turned up in a shampoo commercial. By that point their 1994 album Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain was an indie classic, slightly more accomplished than their debut Slanted and Enchanted (which plenty of people still prefer), with the same scruffy charm.
On Crooked Rain Pavement musically referenced Dave Brubeck’s ‘Take Five’, included pianos, the shouty track ‘Hit the Plane Down’, but mostly perfected Stephen Malkmus’ favoured type of mid-tempo guitar pop.
I remember reading a review of Crooked Rain in the NZ Herald, by either Russel Baillie or Graham Reid. In my memory it ran the same week as a piece on Soundgarden’s Superunknown, which was released a few weeks later.
To me the album represents a point where I branched off from the heaviness and rigidity of the latter, and allowed room for music that was more unkempt, and quieter, and weirder, than I was used to.
Last year I saw Pavement play at Auckland’s St James theatre, and the tracks from this album in particular still felt like formative miracles.
Bakesale by Sebadoh was a wilder proposition than anything by Pavement, but a lot of that comes down to production values. Although their fifth album was a step up from the lo-fi sound of its predecessors, its aesthetic still makes songs like ‘Rebound’ feel more rugged than they actually are.
Jason Loewenstein’s entries were intentionally bruising, but Lou Barlow, who’d left Dinosaur Jr, mostly wrote ballads, then housed them in a punky squalls. This album, which I bought on cassette aged fourteen, felt illicit, and impossibly cool.
Another band who’d graduated to a real studio, for their fourth album Chocolate and Cheese, Ween were a duo who felt a bit like the musical equivalent of South Park, (a show they would go on to appear in): undoubtedly funny, and intentionally morally iffy.
They used the pseudonyms Dean and Gene Ween, and wrote genre pastiches, but the novelty label never stuck, because their songs were, are still are, just too good.
‘Freedom of ‘76’ is about Philadelphia while musically riffing on Philly Soul (as well as Prince, who they often nodded to), with lyrics so silly you might miss the technical chops, particularly Gene’s incredible falsetto.
Another single, ‘Voodoo Lady’, was a play on Bayou blues, dragged into Ween’s weird orbit.
A perhaps underdiscussed element of their success are Dean Ween’s guitar solos, which blast into most of these songs, regardless of genre, and elevate them all.
Plenty of lyrics on Chocolate and Cheese are intentionally offensive, but the songs are breezy and refreshing, and some of them, like ‘Roses Are Free’, ‘Joppa Road’, and ‘What Deaner Was Talkin’ About’, are relatively free of quirk.
‘94 was a banner year for indie rock, and while this album feels like something else entirely, it’s worthy of inclusion in the canon.
