Pavement:Classic or Dud

Preferring TT over slanted is crazy talk

I just like music that sounds good you see

I will say this: lyrically, TT is fascinating and very strong.

Slanted's overall frequencies are just a bit raw and unpleasant to me ymmv

Musically, it’s not bad! It’s just doing a bunch of different stuff and, yes, I enjoy slightly messier Pavement.

Have we polled TT?

slanted sounds positively lush after the EP's!

Oh yeah I just tried to listen to Westing and I agree.

Get the feeling the earlier stuff is a bit "had to be there" and I wasn't, but Crooked onwards feels fairly timeless to an extent

not like pavement suddenly became steely dan on terror twilight, it is still a very loose record (with richer overall sonics, which might be part of the problem for me, actually)

“Everybody look at me and my wonderful jooooooob” - deserves a think piece of its own (I’m not being sarcastic)

I just don't think Godrich was a good fit for Pavement at all.

IMO Godrich's touches on TT are barely noticeable and it's just a really...nice-sounding record. Definitely the cleanest-sounding Pavement record, though that crystalline quality serves some of the songs ("Spit on a Stranger", "Major Leagues") much better than others ("Folk Jam", "Platform Blues")

Kind of hope I get to review this reissue somewhere because it’ll force me to deal with my feelings about the last couple years of this band

Also Jon OTM

I feel that all five of their albums are going in a very clear, linear progression from one to the next. Terror Twilight is the fruition of what they were going for all along, and has Malkmus's best singing as well.
That "Godrich running order" makes the record out to be an even more forbidding dark prog record than it was before.

Another reason I like this record is that it has some of the most raw expressions of anger and fear in the entire Pavement/Malk ouvre. There is *very* little of the wry distance that is Malk's usual stock-in-trade on songs like "The Hexx" and "Cream of Gold" and I can't think of other songs of his that explore similar emotional terrain so directly. I'm into it.

Like *dread* is a feeling he explores very rarely, and he does it in a really compelling way here

i remember reading a story somewhere, maybe the perfect sound forever book, where nastanovich mentions talking to godrich in the studio some time into the recording of TT and godrich not remembering who he was. hope that makes it into the liners

I've loved Terror Twilight since it came out ("Spit on a Stranger" radio premiere and album release day probably the two high points of my middle school years), was surprised to finally learn a few years ago how many don't.

OEO, this is why the liners may be lit. It depends on how everyone feels now.

Was it Nast who formally named the record?

xxxp Yeah, that's in the book... after they were all working on the album for a while, Nast sort of "tests" to see if Nigel knows his name, and it becomes clear that he doesn't.

was tweeting about this today but always love silkworm's cover of the hexx

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrFpl6_Rq28

Who wanted to call it Farewell Horizontal?

Oh, missed that they added that to the reissue title, haha

iirc Malkmus wanted to call it Farewell Horizontal and Bob objected and came up with Terror Twilight

Glad Bob prevailed there, lol

Crazy, I was just googling the other day.... where’s the damn TT deluxe ?!?

TT is a little boring. “Major Leagues” ... yeah it works great as a stand alone lyric or poem. But maybe not as a tune

album's already deluxe imo

xxp he has a good line in the slow century doc where hes like "i just couldnt face spending a year of my life on the 'farewell horizontal' tour"

BTC:

Shady Lane
Transport is Arranged
Type Slowly
Embassy Row
Starlings in the Slipstream
Fin

TT:

Major Leagues
...And Carrot Rope
Ann Don't Cry
Spit on a Stranger
Billie

So much of TT is Nigel Goodrich applying ten ounces of cleaning varnish to undeserving tracks. It's no embarrassment but I don't need it.

album's already deluxe imo

― swing out sister: live in new donk city (geoffreyess), Thursday, February 11, 2021 2:58 PM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

/thread

Alfred, the TT tracks you like are the ones I’m at best neutral on lol

"speak see remember" was the song that got me into pavement

I dug the SM + Boombox live version of “Carrot Rope” a lot better.

the "godrich removal spell" is to listen to the live bootlegs from 1999 ... some of the TT songs really took off onstage.

― tylerw, Thursday, February 11, 2021 4:28 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

cosigned. first heard The Hexx on the BTC tour at Shepherds Bush Empire and it was immense, almost Sabbath-esque. so disappointed by the TT version. They played Killing Moon as well, which was fabulous. That was definitely the best time I saw Pavement, their guitar soloing was so fluid and lucid back then, almost like Television minus the chops.

My memory on this re TT is fuzzy but BTC and Real Emotional Trash are cases where I made the mistake of getting real cozy with live bootlegs ahead of the proper records dropping ... and then subsequently being disappointed

I think the final two albums suggest a path whereby if Pavement had been more "committed" - lived in the same place, were all into it, maybe honed their "chops," etc. - they could have evolved into a sort of crunchy jam-band version of themselves.

yeah that seems here and there what Malkmus solo turned into

Phew, avoided that bullet.

At the time I thought Godrich’s production turned the lights up a bit too high for Pavement’s thing... the silliness kind of inadvertently got amped up at the expense of fuzziness/weirdness/artiness/noiziness whatever but it’s also a natural trajectory from BtC. I haven’t listened to it in years and never really took to it but it sounds warm and appealing right now. Saw em live on this tour too and I’m super grateful I did. Just seeing Bob screamin away <3

I’m listening to it now; sounds pretty darn good, I gotta say. Seems to get better with age, somehow.

My main objection at this point is that faux British accent that SM affects.

Haha, what songs does he do that?

i don't get on with this band much but i listened to all of their albums when i was trying and there's definitely a new vocal affectation that creeps in on the last couple which is pretty insufferable imo

xp The opening of “Ann Don’t Cry”; “Billie” (“ought to have a second chance”); etc.

“Speak, see, remem-BAH”

Is he putting on a fake British accent or is he trying to sound like Mark E. Smith?

It doesn’t sound like an MES accent to me (and that’s the only British accent I’m halfway an expert in!); I think maybe he was listening to lots of UK folk or something at the time.

This has got me listening to Watery, Domestic and this is one of the few records I simply can't understand what it is to not like, it's about the most perfect 11 minutes of rock ever recorded

it’s their peak for sure