Pavement - Slanted & Enchanted: Luxe & Reduxe
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Music CD Cover
Artist: PavementEdition: Music CD
Format: Original recording reissued, Original recording remastered
CD Release Date: 2002-10-22
Music Label: Matador Records
Soundtracks:
Music CD 1
- Summer Babe (Winter Version)
- Trigger Cut/Wounded-Kite at :17
- No Life Singed Her
- In The Mouth A Desert
- Conduit For Sale!
- Z - rich Is Stained
- Chesley's Little Wrists
- Loretta's Scars
- Here
- Two States
- Perfume-V
- Fame Throwa
- Jackals, False Grails: The Lonesome Era
- Our Singer
- Summer Baby (7" version)
- Mercy Snack: The Laundromat
- Baptist Blacktick
- My First Mine
- Here (alternate mix)
- Nothing Ever Happens
- Circa 1762 (John Peel Session - June 23, 1992)
- Kentucky Cocktail (John Peel Session - June 23, 1992)
- Secret Knowledge of Backroads (John Peel Session - June 23, 1992)
- Here (John Peel Session - June 23, 1992)
- Texas Never Whispers (from Watery, Domestic)
- Frontwards (from Watery, Domestic)
- Lions (Linden) (from Watery, Domestic)
- Shoot The Singer (1 Sick Verse) (from Watery, Domestic)
- Sue Me Jack (Watery Sessions)
- So Stark (You're a Skyscraper) (Watery Sessions)
- Greenlander (Watery Sessions)
- Rain Ammunition (John Peel Session - December 16, 1992)
- Drunks with Guns (John Peel Session - December 16, 1992)
- Ed Ames (John Peel Session - December 16, 1992)
- The List of Dorms (John Peel Session - December 16, 1992)
- Conduit For Sale (Live Brixton Academy London December 14, 1992)
- Fame Throwa (Live Brixton Academy London December 14, 1992)
- Home (Live Brixton Academy London December 14, 1992)
- Perfume V (Live Brixton Academy London December 14, 1992)
- Summer Babe (Live Brixton Academy London December 14, 1992)
- Frontwards (Live Brixton Academy London December 14, 1992)
- Angel Carver Blues/Mellow Jazz Docent (Live Brixton Academy London December 14, 1992)
- Two States (Live Brixton Academy London December 14, 1992)
- No Life Singed Her (Live Brixton Academy London December 14, 1992)
- So Stark (Live Brixton Academy London December 14, 1992)
- Box Elder (Live Brixton Academy London December 14, 1992)
- Baby Yeah (Live Brixton Academy London December 14, 1992)
- In the Mouth a Desert (Live Brixton Academy London December 14, 1992)
Free Music Notes for Slanted & Enchanted: Luxe & Reduxe
Free Music Review: Still better than your favorite indie-rock album.
Hit: 5 Stars
I once started an entire webpage devoted to pointing out how Slanted & Enchanted is STILL better than your own personal favorite indie-rock album. Now that it's been reissued in one of the most fantastic "deluxe" packages ever devoted to an individual album (ALL the bonus material is worth it, the B-sides are top-shelf material, the Watery, Domestic EP contains two of the group's all-time greats in "Frontwards" and "Shoot The Singer," the BBC sessions are nearly as essential, "Greenlander" is the group's great lost track, and the concert catches a notoriously hit-or-miss live group at their best), it's worth reconsidering why this album is so fantastic, and why it managed to win me over when I'm the sort of music-lover least inclined to enjoy stuff like this.
You have to understand, I came to this album from the point of view of an arch-skeptic. My friend told me to buy this when I was still in my hardcore "nothing from beyond 1980 is worth hearing" phase as a freshman in college. And honestly, when I first put it on, I thought someone had played a cruel joke on me. Awful production, distortion and guitar noise everywhere (like somebody was jabbing a screwdriver into my ears! Gaaah!), a singer who couldn't (or wouldn't) sing, jagged chord changes and some gratingly strange lyrics ("What is this 'I'M TRYING! I'M TRYING!' tosh?") After a few grudging, half-attentive listens, I put it aside thinking that so-called "indie" music just probably wasn't for me.
Ah what a fool.
Several years later I came back to this album a changed man. My musical boundaries had broken out of their original '60s ghetto during the intervening period, and when I went back to Slanted & Enchanted and had one of those epiphanies that are so rare and so prized with rock music. What had been inscrutable before just jumped out at me now: brilliant songs with quirky, wonkish lyrics, and oh-so-melodic vocal lines running throughout nearly every one. I'm a bigot for melody, and the lo-fi production (which I still consider to be a needlessly self-inflicted wound) disguises some of the best melodies and most well-written songs of the era: "Trigger Cut" would have been a pop-rock smash in any just universe, a double A-side along with "Here." "In The Mouth A Desert," "Zurich Is Stained," "Summer Babe," "Loretta's Scars," "Two States" (which seems to me to be a total ripoff of Paul McCartney & Wings' "Helen Wheels," I might point out): these songs displayed a craft in their construction that pointedly belied the tinny production and indifferent, almost apathetic image the band sought to project.
The more experimental and abrasive material also works too; "No Life Singed Her," crazy shouting and all, actually has a hardcore riff that provides a solid backbone for the piece, and the (clearly Fall-indebted) screams of "I'M TRYING!" in "Conduit For Sale!" end up being one of the album's most memorable moments. (How many times I've found myself muttering that line that under my breath...)
Even today, after years of further exposure to newer and weirder stuff, "Trigger Cut" is STILL the catchiest freakin' pop-hit-that-never was, with holy grail chord-changes, clever guitar layering by Spiral Stairs, and an ensemble performance that flies and swoops more than it has any right to do given the fact that a.) the bandmembers lived in four different states, b.) they rarely played together, c.) the drummer was a Sixties acid casualty. I STILL put "Here" on all of my mix CDs, and "Conduit For Sale!" STILL out-Falls the Fall (without even really TRYING....TRYING...TRYING...TRYING).
The seeming randomness of Stephen Malkmus' lyrics STILL disguises a pathos and resignation that his voice conveys equally adeptly: with the echt-ennui of a Gen X clown, he snarks to keep from crying. Malkmus' voice originally annoyed me intensely, as I automatically associated it with a raft of lazy '90s slacker-toned lead singers who plagued the airwaves under the guise of "alternative" music. But the difference between Pavement and those other late, unlamented groups isn't just the brilliant higher-order songwriting or Malkmus' natural melodic knack. (Look, man: "Zurich Is Stained." That sort of crazy inspired melody - both new AND catchy - only comes along once in awhile.) It's also found in the way Malkmus manages to sound at once flippant and sincere while singing lyrics that, for the most part, seem calculated to confuse. "Here" is an obvious exception, but the strange, practiced inflections of "Trigger Cut" do an even more impressive job of creating emotional coherence out of words that ought not to make any literal sense.
Yup, it's still better than your favorite indie-rock album. Unless Slanted & Enchanted happens to be your favorite indie-rock album already, of course. In which case you, my friend, have your priorities straight.
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