Does anyone else think Slanted & Enchanted is Pavement's worst album?

IMO

I think it holds up quite well too. I still listen to it every once in a while - which is about as often as I listen to any Pavement album.

Funny how neophytes have an easier time absorbing "Slanted" than they do "Wowee."

Pardon my butt, Terror Twilight just slipped out.

That said, it's a fantastic album, a perfect experimental pop full-length extension of their earlier work. Also: amazing drumming, they never recovered after Gary.

anyway, it isn't that no one knew who they were--it's that you had to read Spin to know who they were, rather than turning on the radio or watching MTV (at least till "Cut Your Hair"). it was getting in on the ground floor of something rather than watching it rise up in front of you faster than you could keep track. that's what I'm talking about.

Wowee Zowee is 2, then Crooked Rain. Brigthen the Corners and Terror Twilight are distant followers.

Nostalgia is probably part of it for me, I got it months after it came out and for that first year it really did feel like a secret club or something. That, Nevermind and Loveless are the big 3 albums I associate with going to college, youth, no mortgage, etc.

But all of Pavement's music has aged incredibly well.

True, there were no enthusiastic music fans prior to Pavement.

S&E is a fantastic debut art-rock record , probably their best in terms of conception and process... but it seems on ILM the issue is less of the music itself (surprise!), but rather cultural critique/issues/insecurities coming through here on this thread (more surprise!)

But I've made my peace with such issues, as I have my own "rampant surplus of twentysomething english majors not-writing about music" issue to take care of.

Fantastically untrue for me and my music-loving friends in that particular era. College/independent radio stations played Pavement's early singles/EPs seemingly non-stop. Like I pointed out, there was a genuine enthusiasm over Pavement, and if you want to foster that Spin magazine was the reason for this, then you can take your bizarro badge back and pin it proudly to your forehead!

s&e has some of my favorite malkmus songs. "loretta's scars," "conduit for sale," "summer babe," "fame throwa." i prefer crooked rain because of the thicker artiness that (i think) came with having accomplished such an amazing feat as debuting so strongly. "stop breathin'," "fillmore jive," "elevate me later," "gold soundz"

i'm curious how all the pavement lovers are reacting to face the truth. i'm not as into it as pig lib. it's less focused or something. maybe there's something i'm missing. i'm still pretty into it though

Wowee Zowee = Watery, Domestic > Slanted & Enchanted = Crooked Rain Crooked Rain > Westing >>> Terror Twilight >>>> Brighten the Corners

They were all over it before it came out. There's a rave write-up on it and a relatively sizable/well placed article on them (for a band with only 7" EPs and a 10"EP at the time on the then-miniscule Drag City) in the Spin issue with a blue haired Kurt Cobain on the cover, and the state of American underground rock inside. This was aboot 6 months prior to the album's release. The month before Perfect Sound Forever had been "One of the Best Albums You Didn't Hear This Year".

I've always been confused by the Internet love for CR,CR. I like it well enough (it's the only Pavement record I have on LP and CD), but I don't see it being as great as S&E; I've always wondered if the majority of people who prefer it heard it first.

I like the SM solo stuff, but ah, uhh ... /whiny fan-boy grumbling

It was my first indie rock album ever, but I think I also prefer it for the same reason I prefer Reckoning to Murmur. The filler's less arty and either more trad rock or distinctly a genre exercise ("5-4=Unity," "Don't Go Back To Rockville"). I just think they flow better as wholes.

for me, yes. i remember not liking them from what i'd read about them. they sounded bratty. (i was a freshman in college at the time.) but then a friend of mine convinced me to give crooked rain a chance and i found myself won over immediately, from those first warm up chords. it took me much longer to get into s&e.

Terror Twilight > Slanted and Enchanted > Wowee Zowee > Crooked Rain Crooked Rain > Brighten The Corners

I'd put Westing as second best, if I could. also, if I were allowed to edit down Wowee Zowee, it would rank highest.

Really, the only one above that I don't find all that good is Brighten The Corners.

I rank Terror highest similarly to why I rank Pixies' Trompe Le Monde highest.. it was really an amazing solo album using a solid band as the backup before the breakup. I don't own any Malkmus nor Frank Black albums, though.

Beautifully put - my thoughts exactly.

xpost

OTM. Nostalgia need not be cited either. I was a hemisphere away at the time and certainly wasn't reading Spin or, say, NME, and a chance hearing of something off S&E (or possibly Perfect Sound Forever) sans hype had me captivated and waiting for the announcer to disclose the artist. To my teenage brain they simply sounded effortlessly cool in a way yer previous generation of US indie giants no longer were. It was genuinely that simple. Now take the best 5 songs off S&E and compare them to the best 5 off any other LP and the former will have to manage at least a tie or a narrow loss, even in the eyes of the most sceptical. Simple. Effortless and snappy and yet inexplicably moving little songs.

Gygax, maybe you were more "plugged in" at the time, but for me Spin's championing of the band was ABSOLUTELY why I heard of Pavement and got into them, and indie rock in general for that matter.

1. "No Life Singed Her"
2. "Conduit for Sale!"
3. "Chesley's Little Wrists"

Three tracks for the "songs you always skip" threads. CR, CR had a few of those as well.

Do you feel the same way about Thee Velvet Underground's Loaded? Just curious...

Crooked Rain Crooked Rain - Just an all-round perfect indie rock album. The songwriting is improved, the sense of fun is still there and the tinny lo-fi is pretty much gone without losing any of Pavement's charm. Barely a bad moment (apart from perhaps Hit The Plane Down), this is just classic all the way through.

Wowee Zowee - a sprawling affair but not without it's merits and sometimes it rates as my favourite Pave album. That said, compared to CRCR this took me an awfully long time to get into and I only learned to appreciate it properly after forced repeated listenings. It payed off though. The songs go right across the board. Whereas CRCR seemed a tighter, more compact affair, Wowee Zowee is epic and experimental. Features some of their very best songs, Motion Suggests, Father To A Sister of Thought, Fight This Generation... I may well need to listen to this again tonight.

Brighten The Corners - contrary to popular belief this IS a really really great Pavement album. As my introduction to the band bar a few singles, I feel that this has Malkmus's most lyrically inventive work of his career. It's like listening to a word conundrum, trying to filter out certain meanings and having a jolly good time with it too. The fact that this album is cleaner in production and has a darker, more subdued tone is probably the reason a lot of people got put off. There are only one or two full on rock freakouts, very few jolly songs, but in their place are some of the best ballads Pavement ever did (Infinite Spark, Starlings In The Slipstream), two fantastic singles (Shady Lane, Stereo) and a host of classic cryptic lines "One of us is a cigar stand", "Pigs they tend to wiggle when they walk". I think I could recite this whole album back to via human beatbox if given the chance.

Terror Twilight - I like to regard this as Pavement's prog-rock album. Fresh from doing OK Computer, Nigel Godrich produced the album which I'm sure got well up the backs of the S&E recorder-grotters. I see this as a great transitional record and had Pavement stuck together they would have made something very special but altogether different from their previous output. I think The Hexx is the most sonically amazin thing Pavement have done, Major Leagues an emotional haven, and Carrot Rope one of the great forgotten singles of the 90s. Malkmus's lyrical invention is again displayed on this album and some choice lines "The lion reaps his own reward/Serengetti nightmare for the eco-tour" and "Watch out for the gypsy children in electric dresses they're insane/I hear they'll sit in crematoriums and smoke your remains" just beg deciphering. Malky's prog tendencies would be later and more fully displayed on Pig Lib, probably my most played album of this decade.

actually i'd probably say that S+E is my favorite rock album of all time. i have listened to it more than any other record ever made, i would guess easily 1,000 times. the only track i ever skip is "two states" actually.

not a lot of love for "our singer" here, which is too bad cause it's one of the most underrated pavement songs.

This is actually true for me. I mean, I was there first. I bought the first seven inch, the ten inch, the whole nine yards. And yeah, I *DO* think Slanted is the best full-length. So sue me.

That record is not "ultra lo-fi" at all. The settings on the synth and guitar signals may sound purposefully over-distorted and overdriven but the fidelity of the recording is pretty sophisticated (8-track board).