Pavement - Brighten the Corners

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Free Music Notes for Brighten the Corners

Free Music Review: Pavement stops upchucking and starts COMPOSING!
Hit: 5 Stars

Case in point: Shady Lane-- it's indie poprock perfection. Two perfectly symmetrical verses + chorus, scrubbed, trimmed, and served with a side of funny. Ripping off a classic butt-rock chord progression, Steve Malkmus crafts lyrics that resonate musically/rhythmically, but not semantically, motivating that silly old chord progression with clashing guitar lines that pop off a straightforward, driving rhythm. Singing about his "blind date with the chancer" and getting told off "in front of all the bellboys and the over-friendly concierge", Malkmus evokes the world of the somewhat distant, warm-n-fuzzy past where we all screwed up... but, hey, everything's fine now in retrospect, even beautiful and funny... what's more, at the end of it all you're not quite sure whether Malkmus is singing about joints or an actual shady lane: the bright nostalgic past... but where did THAT mood come from? it couldn't be those oddball lyrics? or do even THOSE start to make sense as Pavement matures. Malkmus also exploits "ambiguous pronunciation" to new ends: did we go "dutch, dutch, dutch" or "touch, touch, touch" when the check arrived? (This technique surfaces early on in Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain where "career" morphs into "Korea" in the song, 'cut your hair'.)

Maturity, that's it in a nutshell, folks. Brighten the Corners is Pavement's 'coming of age' album. And the inevitable standardization that comes with such maturity is precisely what fuels so many die-hard fans' misapprehensions about Brighten. They want the old enfant-terrible Pavement back. But give this a chance, I tell you, and you won't regret it.

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