their heralded previous efforts.

Despite – or maybe because of – obvious lifts from Sonic Youth, the Fall and the Pixies on earlier 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