Pavement: Quarantine the Past - The Best of Pavement
Pavement: Quarantine the Past - The Best of Pavement
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By Adam Leveridge
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Tuesday, 09, Mar 2010 11:20
Domino, out now.
What's it all about?
Having caught the reunion bug, one of the most influential acts of the 90s release the obligatory best-of in support of the hugely-anticipated reformation tour.
Who's it by?
Hailing from California, Stephen Malkmus and Scott Kannberg formed Pavement in 1989, releasing their debut album Slanted and Enchanted in 1992. Thus began a catalogue of albums of a consistently high standard, yet their recording career was littered with curveballs: Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain's deeply melodic strains and glossy sheen of a mix were a far cry from Slanted...'s abrasiveness and lo-fi aesthetic. Wowee Zowee subsequently scared away the mainstream, a eclectic mess of an album treasured more than any other Pavement recording by many hardcore fans.
With the reunion announced last year after a ten-year hiatus, the full line up are undertaking a reunion tour which will incorporate a foray into the UK.
As an example...
"So drunk in the August sun, and you're the kind of girl I like/Because you're empty, and I'm empty/And you can never quarantine the past." - Gold Soundz
"Out on tour with the Smashing Pumpkins/Nature kids,I/They don't have no function/I don't understand what they mean?And I couldn't really give a f**k." - Range Life
What the others say
"It's exactly what a Pavement retrospective should be - a heavily slanted, palpably enchanted slab of richly flawed anarcho-pop." - Mark Powell, Drowned in Sound
"Unlike many Best Ofs before it, Quarantine... actually succeeds in acting as both an accessible introduction and a cohesive trip down memory lane." - Lisa Wright, The Fly
So is it any good?
When a band's back catalogue is as rich as Pavement's, it is very easy to simply say that a best of compilation is unnecessary, even inappropriate. Not many fans can be expected to adopt such a collection when trying to impart the band on to their nearest and dearest. Nevertheless, you would have to go very wrong to put together a bad Pavement compilation. And at 23 tracks long, this is a generous one at that.
No other band has been able to dose their music with such impassioned nonchalance and appropriately, the same spirit pervades this collection, which is appropriately imbued with a slapdash feel, yet on the whole flows with a tangible purpose. Minimal time gaps between tracks betray the awesome power of many of these songs - the listener is barely given a moment's thought to take in the beauty of Wowee Zowee's beautiful Grounded before Slanted and Enchanted's opener Summer Babe (Winter Version) trudges in.
It is indeed Slanted and Enchanted's contributions that can, at times, feel slightly uncomfortable in this sequence of songs, and one or two EP tracks feel like an inclusion to overcompensate for this, being their closest relatives. Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain through last album Terror Twilight share similar production values, whereas you are reminded that Slanted..., more than any other Pavement album, is best experienced as a singular body of work.
There are also a handful of glaring omissions and a couple of tracks that could have easily missed the cut: Rattled by the Rush should have usurped Fight this Generation and Loretta's Scars would have been a more appropriate inclusion than Two States. The end product, however is still of a stunning quality, rendering it difficult for yours truly to pick out a handful of highlights. Worth mentioning is the delightfully early inclusion of the Perfect Sound Forever EP's Mellow Jazz Docent, a two-minute slice of abrasion containing an inner beauty - it is comfortably the best of their early EP tracks. Otherwise, mainstays like MTV-botherer Cut Your Hair, Brighten the Corners opener Stereo and trash talker Range Life are rightly given pride of place at the core of the compilation and are offset by low-key efforts Here, Heaven is a Truck and Spit on a Stranger. It really is a frequent delight to listen to.
The best starting point for a new listener will continue to be Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, and many tracks simply make you want to listen to its source album instead, but this is a fine alternative from a band that deserves to be heard by a whole new generation. It is good to have them, albeit briefly, back again.
8/10
John McGlone