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Pavement x30 (Descriptions et al.)

not really ranked, but the thirty that came to mind when I started writing this.. looking on it now, Wowee Zowee is heavily under-represented, but I've always loved that record whole anyway.. early EP's and Crooked Rain-era offcuts are slacking too.. regardless...................................................
30Pavement
Brighten The Corners: Nicene Creedence Edition

The Classical – A cheeky cover of The Fall, whom Pavement have long been implied to have imitated. Though my aesthetic allegiance will ultimately always lie with The Fall, there’s no denying that Pavement’s post-Slanted era saw them forge a sound that was entirely their own. The original off Hex Induction Hour is a Fall classic, but Malkmus’ cover is important if only because it’s a fantastic show of just how much of a pop culture juggernaut The Fall could have been if Mark E. Smith wasn’t so unflinchingly anti-commercial in ideology.
29Pavement
Brighten The Corners: Nicene Creedence Edition

The Killing Moon – I placed this one and The Classical last on purpose just because they are covers, but this ranking is very vague in hierarchy anyway. An Echo and the Bunnymen song, and a fantastic one at that. Pavement give it such a jangly, yelp-prone swing. I’ve always loved this tune from the Brighten the Corners period.
28Pavement
Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain

Silence Kit – Crooked Rain is not my favourite Pavement album by a fairly long shot. Of their three most commercially-oriented records, it falls below Brighten the Corners and above the generally-limp Terror Twilight for me. And after the feedback-heavy wonderfulness of Slanted, this album could at times feel lifeless. The high points on it however are dizzyingly good, and this tiered opener is sublime.
27Pavement
Terror Twilight

The Hexx – One of only two Terror Twilight entries on this list, and this one is in fact a fleshed-out reworking of a Brigthen the Corners song to boot. Their last album has always been a conflicting moment for me, a slightly disoriented sound of a band standing at their mid-road. Unfortunately, the second part of that road never came for Pavement, leaving Twilight as their underwhelming last statement. But The Hexx is eerily beautiful, a slow, measured burn full of paranoiac lyrics and a piercingly sharp solo.
26Pavement
Wowee Zowee

Grave Architecture – I love Wowee Zowee for more than just its stellar songs. It was also a left turn for Pavement, ditching the radio-friendly slants that they started mining on Crooked Rain, and veering back into the strange. That move may have cost them financially, but solidified them artistically. Most every song on Wowee had an odd, off-kilter little glitch to it, and the breakdown on Grave Architecture, an otherwise by-the-numbers indie rocker, is beautiful noisy fun.
25Pavement
Brighten the Corners

Date w/ IKEA – Scott Kannberg’s guitar chops are un-paralleled or at least scarcely imitable in the indie rock niche, but for all that jittery, good noise he coated Malkmus’ songs in, his own contributions to Pavement albums have always been fairly straightforward mid-tempo rock tunes. And this is one of the best, though it’s sometimes difficult to see past the fact that it’s simply an addictively catchy ditty.
24Pavement
Slanted and Enchanted

Jackals, False Grails – A mercilessly stalwart burst of noise rock. I’ve got one holy life to give!
23Pavement
Terror Twilight

Harness Your Hopes – Off the Spit on a Strange EP, this slacker anthem was one of their most beloved and obscure B-sides until the expansive new editions of their four albums threw all of their forgotten toss-offs into the public ether.
22Pavement
Brighten The Corners: Nicene Creedence Edition

Roll With the Wind (Roxy) – This is pretty much a boogie song, a bad CCR rip-off and it is a shit-ton of fun. Three minutes of danceable forward momentum, with crackling bass and loose solos.
21Pavement
Watery, Domestic

Lions (Linden) – The B-Sides and EP cuts from the Slanted era are their strongest, in my opinion. A young band still cutting their teeth, loud and snotty and kind of lost, but excited and teeming with songs, spilling from their every pore. This short tune off one of their first EP’s is the sound of a band first starting to gestate.
20Pavement
Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain

Cut Your Hair – Another captivatingly catchy Crooked Rain cut. Pavement’s trademark ooooh’s that they loved splicing pre-choruses with border on saccharine and cutesy here, but given the song’s lyrics, it fits quite beautifully.
19Pavement
Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain

Unfair – They can pull off a pissy punk song with enough competence and charisma, but it isn’t really their field to begin with, and while this fireball of a song is propulsive and lovely, it’s loud chorus isn’t so much rallying as it is poetically depressed. Like every properly loud moment in Pavement’s career.
18Pavement
Wowee Zowee

We Dance – Wowee Zowee’s opener is a piano-led call for loss of consciousness and tumble into romance. Short and tender and ‘zany,’ Malkmus’ solo career would see him try to write a hundred other songs like it. And while he’s occasionally come close, this stands as one of his most achingly pretty instants.
17Pavement
Slanted and Enchanted: Luxe and Reduxe

Kentucky Cocktail – One of the loudest points of Pavement, Kentucky Cocktail is coated in thick, unforgiving feedback. The stop-start nature of it, broken up by honed basslines and crazed soloing, is very Pixies-esque. And that’s always a good thing, when the song turns out so damn good!
16Pavement
Brighten the Corners

Starlings of the Slipstream – A starkly beautiful one. After the second verse, the hollow silence that briefly takes over the song before Kannberg starts imploding on guitar leaves you wide open like a gutted fish.
15Pavement
Watery, Domestic

Frontwards – The best song from Watery, Domestic, their best EP, and traditionally the most popular contender of an obvious song they should have stuck on a full-length. Frontwards is an encapsulation of their early days. Noisy, reverberating, pumped full of college rock goodness, and decked out with a chorus that’s as catchy as anything they wrote afterwards.
14Pavement
Brighten the Corners

Old to Begin – Malkmus’ oblique confessional, from an album that was more or less dedicated to the notion of being in the midst of existential straits and feeling at a loss of what to do next. Precociously over-aware since its writers were only just hitting 30 at the time, Old to Begin is nevertheless a witty take on how to cope with the feeling of purposelessness.
13Pavement
Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain

Gold Soundz – This is seemingly another Malkmus-focused entry, since the bulk of his work with the Jicks skirts this general template. A rush of a song, tenderized and pointed, driving while still remaining frail, and at times too much of a wise-ass for its own good.
12Pavement
Brighten the Corners

Embassy Row – I’ve always hated the hobbled, exhausted-sounding intro to this song that goes on for a full minute, mostly because it just sounds like Pavement aping their own sound. But once Embassy Row takes off, there’s no stopping it. It jogs past two verses without skipping a beat, and dives headfirst into the most first-wave punk solo Kannberg ever tossed out.
11Pavement
Slanted and Enchanted: Luxe and Reduxe

Texas Never Whispers – Another unceremoniously loud early number, which was shamefully omitted from Slanted. Every single Pavement playlist I’ve ever put together for exes, friends, pubs etc. always kicks off with Texas, and then slides into Summer Babe.
10Pavement
Brighten the Corners

Passat Dream – The most gorgeous and perfect pop song they ever wrote.
9Pavement
Terror Twilight

Cream of Gold – The second Terror Twilight entry, and a monster of a song. Their heaviest, with an ending that’s so shuddering and desperate-sounding, it’s hard to catch your breath when it comes at you.
8Pavement
Slanted and Enchanted

Perfume-V – The interplay between Malkmus’ mannered, romantic singing and the guitars that sound like drunken buzz-saws. Relentless and wonderful. They have never made a truly bad album, but to me, they were never as stupidly perfect as they were on Slanted.
7Pavement
Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain

Newark Wilder – I love this tune. It’s so slack, with very slight lounge bar elements to it. The kicker here is the way the verses are sung, Malkmus lightly pulling the song’s structure into odd corners, then snapping it back before Newark becomes permanently stranger.
6Pavement
Slanted and Enchanted

Summer Babe – The quintessential Pavement song, and in my experience, the closest they’ve got to being immediately recognizable to those who don’t listen to Pavement (at least those old enough to have listened to college radio in the 90’s).
5Pavement
Wowee Zowee

Kennel District – A fantastic rave-up of a tune, and a long-time favourite to dance to at parties. Soft enough to pull a girl close to you on the verses, and giddily hop-inducing on the hook. Perfection.
4Pavement
Slanted and Enchanted: Luxe and Reduxe

Here – There are three versions of this song on my Pavement list, and I never skip either of them. First, the fractured and romantic version that ended up on Slanted. Then the original version, covered in guitar fuzz, but still achingly pretty. And the raucous live rendition of it they included on Slanted’s expanded edition.
3Pavement
Wowee Zowee

Grounded – I slow-danced to this gorgeously sad song at my wedding, marrying a girl I'd known for two weeks in a bar. As in marrying in a bar, as well as having met in one. Needless to say, divorce is a lot of fun (it actually is).
2Pavement
Slanted and Enchanted

Loretta’s Scars – The very first Pavement song I’d heard. I was seventeen, in Prague, and at midnight half-drunk, stumbled into a gallery opening, where I met a German girl who then took me across the city’s ex-pat bars. We ended up walking around and making out in the middle of nowhere at 6am, while listening to her music, sharing the ear-buds. This song came on at some point. Fell in love with the band. Fell in love with the girl. Etc. etc. etc.
1Pavement
Slanted and Enchanted

In the Mouth of a Desert – Long since has been my favourite Pavement song and for damn great reason. It’s got everything that made them so critical for indie music. Roaming guitars that come to life then dissipate all at a moment’s notice. Lyrics half-sung, half-spoken, half-yelled. An infectious hook. Static-filled noise shredding. A general feeling of abandon and loss. And those fucking ooooh’s!!!! Every time I listen to Mouth of a Desert, it's a perfect moment. Every goddamn time.
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