Career opportunity

Pavement refine without giving up or selling out

by Franklin Soults

For the fourth straight album, Stephen Malkmus, Scott Kannberg, and the three other musicians who make up Pavement have managed the remarkable feat of appearing totally familiar and bracingly different at the same time. In fact, the first thing that hits you about Brighten the Corners (Matador, in stores this Tuesday) is how little they seem to have changed over the years. Somehow these veteran California wastrels have remained casual, emotive, edgy, and lyrical all at once -- when so many bands who sound like them are just raw and sloppy. Yet as the title suggests, there's also been a crucial change here. After ramshackle experimentation and jagged romance of the careering Slanted and Enchanted (1992), the aching melodiousness of the grandly pessimistic Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain (1994), and the rampant underground eclecticism of the showy Wowee Zowee (1995), this new one is a relaxed, open-hearted respite. It has no pure pop standouts to attract radio programmers like "Cut Your Hair" or even "Summer Babe." Yet from start to finish, all of its Pavementy ruckus is subsumed by an attractive, affecting tunefulness.

And something more. The easy self-assurance of Brighten the Corners may be different from anything they've done before, but it makes me wonder whether it will be pretty much all they do from now on. Yes, they may still come up with something completely unexpected. But this new album suggests that they may finally have found their range life (as one song calls it) and settled down into their heretofore famously avoided career, career, career.

Of course, most fans -- and detractors -- would say they entered that phase of the rock-and-roll game much earlier. If you took a poll, the average start date of their professional life would be placed somewhere around the time Malkmus sang his "career" refrain in the climax of "Cut Your Hair," their almost-a-hit single from Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. After all, that album was the most accessible product they had ever made. Not only did they deign to perform carefully constructed pop tunes, but in support of the album they forsook their notorious privacy by giving serious interviews, posing for photo shoots, even making a video -- anything to stoke the publicity machine like honest pros (if not exactly earnest ones). This effort paid off: their first and second albums together sold a quarter-million copies. A respectable number in any context, it seems practically miraculous when you consider that, a decade earlier, underground raves the Replacements sold some 6000 copies of their second album, Hootenanny (the figure stuck in my head at the time because even then it seemed paltry).

But if Pavement's solid success spells "career," that career has never approached the level most of us associate with genuine rock stars. When Capitol Records made Matador part of its corporate family recently, Pavement were surely a huge enticement to the big boys, but that still doesn't put the group on a par with Smashing Pumpkins or Nine Inch Nails or even their role models, Sonic Youth. Pavement's tour of duty in the 1995 Lollapalooza festival proved as much. Some of the benighted reviews I saw in the dailies gave them short shrift, as if they were some sort of acid-damaged novelty act. And I heard other reports of fantastic sets played before largely disinterested crowds.

This commercial limitation has been underlined by the band's utter lack of faith in the starmaking machinery. Pavement may have been reaching for fame on Crooked Rain, but they did it with all the caution of a gun-shy deer stretching to lap some water from a lake. Much of Crooked Rain was about losing faith in rock and roll itself. That doesn't mean losing the need for it or the love of it, just the belief in its hierarchical culture and its restorative power. Although this crisis of faith was just one part of Pavement's romantic, angst-ridden obsession with the whole doomed bloom of youth, it's a testament to Malkmus's intuitive prescience that his album prefigured much of alterna-rock's downfall ("Goodnight to the rock-and-roll era") in the very year that the alternative revolution reached its zenith. Within 10 or 12 months of the CD's release, we experienced both the glorious summer of Live Through This, Monster, and Mellow Gold and the winter of our discontent brought on by depressing grunge rehashes, stagnating sales, and one fatal pull of a shotgun trigger.

No wonder, then, that Pavement's popularity is so limited; what bronzed youth wants to go to Lollapalooza to bob his or her handsome head to songs haunted by the mortality of youth culture? That's more the stuff of pasty-faced rock critics (including yours truly). Indeed, Pavement are almost the definition of a "critics' band." This suspect phrase has always been used by critics themselves to disparage the preferences of others with whom they disagree. Reminding other critics of their self-loathing is always a good way to undermine your enemies' confidence in their own judgment.

But in Pavement's case, the label could also mean, "Critics have more fun." Aside from Malkmus's taste for cultural analysis, his way with meaning can be a joy for alienated intellectuals and closet English majors who have no problem wading through double entendres, private references, and utter horseshit. (Random couplet from the new album: "Praise the grammar police/Set me up with your niece.") Malkmus has also said many times that his distaste for direct expression has to do with his fear of cheapening his most personal emotions. Critics likewise are exposed to too much cheap fakery as guitarslingers try to convince the world that we all need another sorry-ass love song. Needless to say, Malkmus's ambiguity and distance provide a safe way out for both parties. (Then again, the entire cult of authenticity, where singers have to live what they sing about, is a fairly recent romantic delusion in the history of song.)

It's easy to see the sprawling pyrotechnics of Wowee Zowee as a way out of the pessimism, a way to hide from the quandary of significance. But as Malkmus sanely defended the album in an interview with Michael Krugman in Raygun, you could also see it as being, "just about Pavement . . . It's just about all our styles over our whole time that we've been making records . . . It's just supposed to be a good indie-rock record, you know? The things I like about independent music and that scene is, it's kind of free." Brighten the Corners, then, is where Malkmus and company show us what they can do with those styles when they admit that -- like R.E.M. and Sonic Youth and almost no one else I can think of -- they've grown beyond indie rock without either giving up or selling out.

At first, this achievement might feel as if Pavement were just revisiting their tried-and-true formulas, much as it seemed to me when I first put on R.E.M.'s New Adventures in Hi-Fi or Sonic Youth's Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star. As on those albums, the formulas feel not only repetitive but as light as gossamer. But in time, this lightness turns out to be the key; it's really about that dreaded word in indie rock, refinement. In Pavement's case, those refinements are multiple: there's Mark Ibold's newly fluid bass lines providing melodic hooks here and there and harmonic counterpoint everywhere; there's the slow false starts that add extra punch to the rockers when they finally kick in; there's the ever-expanding boundaries of Malkmus's (and whoever's) guitars; there's the improved drumming of Steve West (glad they dropped that proposed title "Westy Can't Drum"); there's Malkmus's plaintive, unsprung vocals (he's learned to nurse their grating imperfections the way some guitarists nurse a good long feedback wave). As for the songs themselves, whether heart-wrenching or invigorating, they focus on just a few themes. Some seem to be about love, others about the empty high life lived by the band. "Type Slowly" might be about death.

For the moment, it doesn't much matter. As Pavement leave explicit meaning behind for pure musicmaking, they could almost be reclaiming the discredited genre of jazz rock. The lyrics are there to provide texture as much as meaning; the grooves become just one element among many; the sonic palette is left wide open but always forged to a carefully developed signature sound. Temperament and imagination are harnessed to the development of craft. Christ, they've even got touches of flute and harpsichord in a couple songs (both fake, I presume). My guess is that once you've reached this stage, you can't go home again. Ain't it a relief?