Rock is dead – long live rock." The Who introduced this contradictory sentiment 20 years ago, around the time of punk's birth, and Pavement revive it for punk's rebirth – and not a moment too soon – on their stunning new album, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. While the Who smashed guitars and eardrums, Pavement smash preconceptions on Crooked Rain – about how an indie-rock band should sound, about whether "alternative music" is an alternative to anything – creating an album that's darker and more beguiling than their heralded previous efforts.
Despite – or maybe because of – obvious lifts from Sonic Youth, the Fall and the Pixies on earlier
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releases, Pavement's slacker sound, which buried primitive pop melodies under layers of pretty noise and lazy rhythms, made critics and the college-radio crowd swoon. On
Crooked Rain, Pavement – vocalist-guitarist Stephen Malkmus, guitarist Spiral Stairs, bassist Mark Ibold, percussionist Bob Nastanovich and drummer Steve West – avoid the expected indie inclinations to noise, volume and lo-fi sound, replacing them with clearly ringing guitars and Bowieesque tinkling piano.
Pavement haven't entirely outgrown their influences – the Velvet Underground's dissonant folk rock especially haunts Crooked Rain, and "Gold Soundz" could be a Cure outtake. More typically, though, Pavement self-consciously appropriate from rock's past, grafting familiar riffs onto their own compositions to disconcerting – and humorous – effect. Sly and the Family Stone's "Everyday People," Free's "All Right Now" and Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction" are all touched on in the opener "Silent Kids" – before the first chorus! Elsewhere, "Cut Your Hair" offers a more-than-passing resemblance to Prince's "Raspberry Beret," "5 – 4 = Unity" incorporates the guitar line from the Beatles' "I Want You (She's So Heavy)," and "Range Life" ends audaciously with the riff from Billy Squier's "Everybody Wants You." These references only make up a small part of Pavement's approach, however, allowing them to avoid the strained irony of fellow pop revisionists like Teenage Fanclub, Urge Overkill and the Pooh Sticks.
Crooked Rain's clean production and insidiously catchy melodies hardly signify that Pavement have sold out – if anything, their vision is more warped and caustic than before. On such previous releases as Watery, Domestic; Slanted and Enchanted; and the numerous, hard-to-find vinyl EPs collected on Westing (By Musket and Sextant), the band's lyrics seemed artily tossed off, resembling dada transmissions from another, more surreal dimension.
On Crooked Rain, though, Malkmus, the band's principal songwriter, appears concerned with more earthly matters, in particular the rise of alternative music and the concurrent death of rock & roll: As "Newark Wilder" laments: "It's a brand-new era/And it
Pavement may have been alternative rock's most notorious mess, but this deluxe reissue of their best album, appended with nearly forty extra tracks, illuminates one of their precious gifts: Like nobody else, the Stockton, California, band could make simple pop-rock chords sound really, really sarcastic. On its breakthrough, 1992's Slanted and Enchanted, melodies crept into a might-racket of guitar noise. Crooked Rain was almost the reverse: superbly crafted rock that only seemed splayed at the edges. "Silence Kid" begins with a fake-offhand guitar splutter, then becomes an anthem; while the ascending riffs of "Elevate Me Later" are cleverly onomatopoetic but also just as majestic and arena-ready as anything by U2. The extra tracks include a nod to Pavement's stadium heroes: The rare "Unseen Power of the Picket Fence" is a hilarious faux-metal homage to R.E.M.
Much of Crooked Rain proper is straight-out lovely: The drawn out, spindly solo of "Stop Breathin" is gorgeous; rarely has so much lazy beauty been wrung from so few actual notes. And with the would-be pop hit "Cut Your Hair," the band, at last, just went for it. Pavement used the skepticism they had toward their idols of the Seventies and Eighties to build a new, imperfect classic rock. Rain is the sound of five school-of-rock geeks trying to make their major matter again, and really, truly succeeding.
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