super groovy delicious bite: pavement

Showing posts with label pavement. Show all posts

Sunday, April 12, 2015

wowee zowee

Pavement wrestled with the elements to bind their hooks in the rabble rousing rain-shed rush of distorted ghosts, splinters, and styles. With the universal praise afforded their first two albums 'Slanted and Enchanted' and 'Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain'; the band felt like they needed to change things up.

'Wowee Zowee' was produced by Pavement at Easley Recording Studios in Memphis, Tennessee with additional work done at Random Falls Studio in New York. The sessions featured Stephen Malkmus on vocals and guitar; Bob Nastanovich on percussion and vocals; Scott Kannberg on vocals and guitar; Steve West on drums and percussion; and Mark Ibold on bass; with Doug Easley adding pedal steel guitar to "Father to a Sister of Thought"; and Sibel Firat playing cello on "Fight This Generation". The album was engineered by Doug Easley, Davis McCain, and Mark Venezia; and mixed by Bryce Goggin, Jan BL, Stephen Malkmus, and Rich Costey. Many fans and critics were disappointed by the album when it was first released; but it broke the band in several countries; and it has gone on to be considered a lost classic.

Malkmus would express: "Do you like progress? Not me. Progress is predictable and predictability involves science. I want nothing to do with science. Life is not a chemistry test. We spend our time in the smoking section, killing ourselves slowly, avoiding the light at all costs ... ['Wowee Zowee'] was like, my song order, and what I thought, you know, was a really cool album, and it kinda got shot down by a lot of people at the time. Or it was maybe just time to have enough of Pavement, because we'd have a pretty good run of it, media-wise and critic-wise. But it's turned out to be a cool, cool album...'Wowee Zowee' was more off the cuff and more odds-n-sods, everything included, warts and all. There's sloppy takes and stuff that we still liked, songs like "AT&T", I'm playing drums on it and I don't even know how to play drums. It was better than the tight version, so we put it on there. It was more like 'We're just going to do this at Mitch Easter's studio and it's gonna be all this sound, and it's all gonna be mixed in the same place.' I don't remember it being necessarily tighter, but when we were mixing it and stuff, there were certain directives, like not as much compression. On 'Wowee Zowee', the engineer did more experimental mixing-- messing around while we were mixing with compressors and echoes ... People are always saying that bands are referential or something. When you talk about a band, and people just say they sound like someone else. I was just saying no one has a trademark to any sound, you should be able to take what you like and instead of treating it like a door, and shutting the doors to different sounds that are supposedly not correct for like an indie-rock band to use, there should be windows all around that you can look through....That’s the attempt to make it sound different each sound, and have different voices, and keep it interesting in that way, but it’s not quite up to those standards. The White Album — that’s a great one...it is the same style... It is not really like one sound is omnipresent on every song. Some of the songs were recorded in different studios, and they were all mixed at different times. I was consciously wanting to do that to just make it seem different."

http://crookedrain.com/

"We Dance"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqgAo4UccDE

"Rattled by the Rush"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_XO5sHn1tw

"Father to a Sister of Thought"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCecDGriMT4

"Grave Architecture"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saRIl4qQvcQ

"Kennel District"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZCQKDw3kT0

'Wowee Zowee'
full album:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE4897F8CD0179907

All songs written by Stephen Malkmus, otherwise noted.

"We Dance" – 3:01
"Rattled by the Rush" – 4:16
"Black Out" – 2:10
"Brinx Job" – 1:31
"Grounded" – 4:14
"Serpentine Pad" – 1:16
"Motion Suggests" – 3:15
"Father to a Sister of Thought" – 3:30
"Extradition" – 2:12
"Best Friend's Arm" – 2:19
"Grave Architecture" – 4:16
"AT&T" – 3:32
"Flux = Rad" – 1:45
"Fight This Generation" – 4:22
"Kennel District" – 2:59 (Scott Kannberg)
"Pueblo" – 3:25
"Half a Canyon" – 6:10
"Western Homes" – 1:49 (Scott Kannberg)

Thursday, June 12, 2014

terror twilight

Pavement fed their thrill and brought on the major leagues in the dusty craft of this crepuscular conclusion. The band had made dramatic changes in their sound with every album, from the lo-fi distortion of 'Slanted and Enchanted' to the twisted classic rock of 'Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain' to the expansive experiments of 'Wowee Zowee' to the pop playfulness of 'Brighten the Corners'. For their next album, they decided to work with acclaimed producer Nigel Godrich. Sessions for 'Terror Twilight' began at RPM recording studio on East 12th Street in New York City and continued at RAK Studios in St. John's Wood, London. The album features Stephen Malkmus on vocals and guitar; Bob Nastanovich on percussion and keyboards; Scott Kannberg on vocals and guitar; Steve West on drums and percussion; and Mark Ibold on bass and vocals; with Dominic Mercott playing drums on "Major Leagues" and "Carrot Rope" and Jonny Greenwood offering harmonica on "Platform Blues" and "Billie".

Nastanovich explains: "We decided to take six months off after the touring for the last record. We wanted to get reacquainted with our families. We have two married gentlemen in the band now. I don't know about their plans for families but I guess, it will be even longer intervals in the future for us...For the first time we set out to make a coherent record. We started recording last July, but then that studio turned out to be sort of a rehearsal space. Then we moved to another, and then on to London. This procedure did seem to make sense at the time and we are pleased with the results... the way it works is, that Steve comes to us with his ideas in the shape of demos and then we start to work on the songs. Some come out pretty much the same he'd imagined them, and others change completely. We did lose some songs in the process...Twilight Terror is the short span between Sunset and Dusk. This is considered the most dangerous time in traffic, because half of the people switch on the headlights, and the other half doesn't. It's when most accidents happen."

Kannberg adds: "Also it stands for times, when strange things happen, like Equinox, during an eclipse or on a full moon and we thought that this would be the best times to listen to this album...What's important is, that we tried to make those songs as good as possible, whereas in the past we recorded as much as possible and then threw away what we didn't like ... This record will be better-sounding, because the studio was a lot better, the instruments were a lot better, the takes were a lot better...I think the album is more Pink Floyd than Radiohead. That's what I call this record: a Pink Floyd record. Just because of Nigel. And every time I say that, he gets really happy."

Ibold imports: "It's 'Slanted and Enchanted', but after somebody played Black Sabbath. The thing is, Slanted always sounded weird next to anything else on the radio, whereas the songs on this record... well, they'll still sound different to songs on the radio, but they're not going to have the problem of sounding like they're coming out of a different stereo system...We definitely had the the idea of going in and doing this and coming up with extra parts or overdubs...There are some tunes where the tunefulness comes in hidden pockets, and then there's like a couple where the tunefulness is... sort of a messenger bag or something!"

'Terror Twilight'
full album:

"Spit on a Stranger" – 3:04
"Folk Jam" – 3:34
"You Are a Light" – 3:54
"Cream of Gold" – 3:47
"Major Leagues" – 3:24
"Platform Blues" – 4:42
"Ann Don't Cry" – 4:09
"Billie" – 3:44
"Speak, See, Remember" – 4:19
"The Hexx" – 5:39
"Carrot Rope" – 3:52

bonus tracks:
"Roll With the Wind"
"Harness Your Hopes"
"The Porpoise and the Hand Grenade"

Thursday, February 13, 2014

crooked rain, crooked rain

Pavement cemented their place in the indie scene and ushered in a brand new era with the cryptic irony of this underground classic. The band had won universal acclaim with their debut 'Slanted and Enchanted' and were primed for a breakthrough on the followup. Stephen Malkmus looks back: "I think we were confident. At that time, it didn’t seem like there was much going on. I think we were just sort of young and invincible-feeling. You don’t even know what it really means. No one was around telling us that much stuff, so we were just on our own. It felt like we had our own niche and our own take on things ... Slanted was sort of a one-off couple of weeks of really being into the Fall and coming over on Christmas vacation and making Slanted And Enchanted and not really expecting anything. When we signed to Matador, we got really positive feedback and were in Spin magazine with a review. It was really well-received. In England, the label Big Cat did a really good job of pushing us into the fray. We were bigger and had more attention than we thought we would. I didn’t want to do that again. I couldn’t do it, anyway, because it was based around Gary [Young, Pavement's original drummer]’s studio and the stuff that he had in the first place. Slanted And Enchanted was made with specific amps, and I couldn’t get back to that. "

Scott Kannberg says: "It’s less of an English post-punk kind of sound, more of a classic-rock California sound, I think. Even though recorded in New York, I think the vibe of the record is a little more California. I mean obviously the lyrics and stuff have to do with California still. But then with New York as well. There’s definitely a change in songwriting... I moved out to New York for about a month. Malkmus lived over in Brooklyn, Mark was in Manhattan at the time, and Bob came to town. So everybody was in different areas. We would just kind of get together every day for a few weeks and meet around noon then record into the wee hours of the night. The mood was really good because we were a touring band and we were young, we were pretty into the whole experience. It was still very new to us, we were still learning how to play our instruments, learning how to record… The mood was cool. Everybody was happy and excited. It was a little weird because of the whole Gary thing, but once we started touring and made the record with Westy we all got over it pretty quick."

Mark Ibold considers: " I think the overall take on ['Crooked Rain'] by the music press was [that it was our] most accessible record because the songs sounded poppier or whatever. But I don’t think things changed that much. I think the songs came across as sounding poppier or more polished and different from the first album mostly because it was a totally different recording experience. Having a different drummer changed things, but to me the songwriting changed from record to record throughout the whole Pavement lifespan. That’s because Stephen really didn’t want to repeat himself. I know that was something we were always very aware of. We never wanted to make another record that just sounded like the previous record. I think that he was pretty good about that. It reflected a bit of what he was listening to at the time, so that might be one of the reasons the album came out sounding differently."

The original trio had expanded after the departure of drummer Gary Young. Bob Nastanovich recalls: "Gary quit. Gary was fed up with a lot of things. He was paranoid that he wasn’t getting paid fairly, and he was touring, which is stressful and arduous anyway. The extreme, thrifty manner that we toured at that time — one hotel room, all piling into a van, insane tour schedules — was fun. But we were in our mid-20s and Gary was 40-something and didn’t take good care of himself, so Gary wanted health insurance, which was a preposterous idea... In a lot of ways, it was like a totally different band aside from Stephen’s songwriting and his vocals and his lyrics. Because Gary recorded pretty much everything we’d recorded up until then so not only did we lose our drummer and a huge personality and an amazing live performer, but we also lost our studio engineer and our studio. I kind of thought that, in that intervening year between 'Slanted' and 'Crooked Rain' when we were pretty busy, I wondered if Pavement would carry on. Fortunately, Stephen and Steve West were becoming really good friends. I don’t know how much of that actually had to do with the fact that Steve West was eventually going to join Pavement. They lived in the same neighborhood and Steve West had grown up with me and we were all mutual friends. Over time, Stephen started fleshing out stuff with Steve West, and he became sort of an obvious choice to be in the band. It felt completely different. It was really difficult for me because I didn’t really see why I should even be in the band without Gary."

Steve West says: "[Malkmus'] girlfriend and mine — we all hung out together. Gary was having problems, and it was an unwritten thing that if Gary quit or something happened, I would be eligible. I remember [Malkmus] telling me a couple of times to put my drumsticks in the oven to keep them warm, because there was such a give-and-take with Gary. [Malkmus] tried to record 'Crooked Rain' with Gary, and Gary just couldn’t get it together enough. Then they went on tour and Gary quit. Then that eventually ended with me joining the group."

The band produced the album at Mark Venezia's Random Falls Studios in New York, New York. The sessions featured Stephen Malkmus on vocals and guitar; Scott Kannberg on guitar and backing vocals; Mark Ibold on bass; Steve West on drums and percussion and Bob Nastanovich on percussion; with Bryce Goggin on engineering, mixing, and piano; and Mark Venezia on engineering. Kannberg reveals: "It wasn’t really a studio, it was just kind of a guy’s apartment. He had set it up as a little studio, he had a tape machine and a little booth we could put the drums in. And basically we could play the drums [along with] a guy on guitar and just play the songs that way, and then overdubbed everything. Which was different than with Slanted, because with Slanted we played as a three-piece, and it kind of has more of a band feel. Crooked Rain is basically all overdubs... It was just our inner circle. I think we did it without anybody really knowing we were doing it. We had a chance to record, we had a chance to do it when we did it. And luckily all the parts kind of came together and Matador really dug it and it was at a time in music when you could put a record out like that.

Malkmus remembers: "You could go in there any time and Mark would just wake up and say he could do it. We’d run the machine ourselves sometimes, but he definitely made the drum sound. He was in charge of the drums because I didn’t really know how to record drums. We really didn’t know whether it had sounded good or not. We had track sheets that were not … we sometimes didn’t even have track sheets. It was totally primitive. We were just running on our confidence of 'Slanted And Enchanted' thinking, 'This is easy, you just do it yourself and record and it’s going to be great because it’s lo-fi rock.' There were different influences of course coming, some classic rock influences. And Steve West himself was a slower — he’s groovy. He has an internal groove, but he wasn’t quite as wild as Gary, and there wasn’t as much kinetic, weird energy from him. So that affected the sound... I was thinking some kind of classic rock, like the Eagles, and riffs that were — I mean, Dinosaur had some of that in it, but I really wanted to put it more in people’s faces that the soft rock ’70s sound could be mined and played off. Also, some of the lyrics were commentary about music about music and that kind of music — that classic-rock Doobie Brothers rich guy archetype myths. I would play around with those when I was doing that kind of music. That was maybe a safety route for us as we were getting more attention, to kind of deflate it or play off it with a knowingness. [I was] kind of feeling a little absurd that we got that much attention. Or just fear — fear of success. Or just fear. But, at the same time, having faith in our chops, and my chops as a songwriter."

'Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain' charted at one hundred and twenty-one on the US Billboard 200, seventy-seven in Germany, forty-one in New Zealand, fifteen in the UK, and number two on the US Heatseekers chart.

http://crookedrain.com/

"Cut Your Hair" went to number ten on the US indie chart.

"Gold Soundz"

"Range Life"

'Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain'
full album:

All songs written by Stephen Malkmus unless otherwise noted.

"Silence Kid" – 3:01
"Elevate Me Later" – 2:51
"Stop Breathin'" – 4:28
"Cut Your Hair" – 3:07
"Newark Wilder" – 3:53
"Unfair" – 2:33
"Gold Soundz" – 2:41
"5-4=Unity" – 2:09
"Range Life" – 4:54
"Heaven Is a Truck" – 2:30
"Hit the Plane Down" (Scott Kannberg) – 3:36
"Fillmore Jive" – 6:38

Thursday, April 19, 2012

slanted and enchanted

Pavement helped to lay the foundation for slacker rock with the tantalizingly twisted, feedback-drenched, lo-fi, mutated melodies of their debut manifesto. 'Slanted and Enchanted' caused seismic shockwaves when it sort of stumbled onto the music scene with its syrupy expansionist guitar sound and dense, impressionistic lyrics. Lead singer Stephen Malkmus says: "We recorded with this local guy Gary Young, who became our drummer – he had a home studio in his garage, we just went in there and knocked 'Slanted and Enchanted' off in a day for a couple hundred bucks. I didn’t know anything about the ‘lo-fi era’ – we thought the album sounded pretty big! We just didn’t know what we were doing. But we were also imitating bands like Chrome from San Francisco, who were very dirty sounding, a weird band for sure. I never really liked The Fall when I was younger ‘cos it’s sort of tuneless. But once you get your head around that, you can get lost in The Fall for a while. That was a nice influence to have." During the recording, the band was expanding. Scott Kannberg remembers: "Oh. Well, we went into Gary's studio in the first single, but Gary only played on maybe one song. He played on another couple of songs on the second single. But when we toured for the first time after the second single, it was a trio I guess." 'Slanted and Enchanted' influenced a whole generation of indie rockers with its cleverness and challenged the mainstream with its success.

www.matadorrecords.com/pavement

'Summer Babe (Winter Version)'

'Trigger Cut'

'Fame Throwa'

'In the Mouth a Desert'

'Zürich Is Stained'

Pavement - Zurich is Stained from Miss Lisa on Vimeo.

'Perfume-V'

'Jackals, False Grails: The Lonesome Era'

'Slanted and Enchanted'
full album:

All tracks written by Stephen Malkmus, except where noted.

1. "Summer Babe (Winter Version)" 3:16
2. "Trigger Cut / Wounded-Kite at :17" 3:16
3. "No Life Singed Her" 2:09
4. "In the Mouth a Desert" 3:52
5. "Conduit for Sale!" 2:52
6. "Zürich Is Stained" 1:41
7. "Chesley's Little Wrists" 1:16
8. "Loretta's Scars" 2:55
9. "Here" 3:56
10. "Two States" Scott Kannberg 1:47
11. "Perfume-V" 2:09
12. "Fame Throwa" 3:22
13. "Jackals, False Grails: The Lonesome Era" 3:21
14. "Our Singer" 3:09

Reading Festival 1992

setlist:
Summer Babe
Perfume-V
Fame Throwa
Kentucky Cocktail
Here
Zurich Is Stained
Lions (Linden)
Two States
Trigger Cut
No Life Singed Her
Black Walls
In the Mouth a Desert
Debris Slide

Saturday, February 11, 2012

brighten the corners

Pavement added a little pop infusion to their smart cynical surrealism with this laid back and delightfully distorted depository of matured and assured indie rock gems. After the experimental madness of 'Wowee Zowee' the band was ready for something more polished. Certainly, there was pressure from Matador's new distributor Capitol Records to make something more accessible. Guitarist and vocalist Stephen Malkmus, guitarist Scott "Spiral Stairs" Kannberg, bassist Mark Ibold, multi-instrumentalist Bob Nastanovich, and drummer Steve West recorded the album with Mitch Easter at his North Carolina home studio, the Fidelitorium. Kannberg says Easter's "biggest contribution was this big old plantation studio mansion which he’s in the process of renovating. There’s music related items everywhere. Some of the different elements were interesting. He had two front parlors with records, posters, and antiquated gear. There were harpsichords, a Chamberlain, a tape loop machine, and tons of old equipment. It had a real good vibe. It was like a candy store. And Mitch went into some long dissertation about sounds. I’d like to go back there because there’s a lot of stuff we never even got to use."

Malkmus points to a change in the band's approach: "Except for 'Brighten the Corners', we didn't rehearse. It was all kinda made up in the studio, the versions and the overdubs, nothing was really planned out, it was actually just made up on the spot. Brighten the Corners, we went to Steve West's house for ten days before we went to Mitch Easter's, where we recorded it. It was a little more focused I guess...'Brighten the Corners' is more straight ahead, like, let the tape run. There were some things added to it, but it was pretty kinda dry, and not so much reverb and not so much compression as the other record."

'Brighten the Corners' went to number seventy in the US, sixty-four in Canada, fifty-six in Sweden, fifty in New Zealand, thirty-eight in Norway, and peaked at number twenty-seven on the British album chart.

http://www.matadorrecords.com/pavement

https://www.facebook.com/pavementtherockband/

About "Stereo", Malkmus says, "I was trying to write a song that was funky with a catchy bass-line." It peaked at number forty-two in the UK.

"Pigs, they tend to wiggle when they walk

The infrastructure rots

And the owners hate the jocks

With their agents and their dates

If the signatures are checked

You'll just have to wait

And we're counting up the instants that we save

Tired nation so depraved

From the cheap seats see us

Wave to the camera

It took a giant ramrod