April 26, 2002

 
As I've made clear in the previous post, the Pavement covers that I found on Audiogalaxy are a pretty miserable bunch, for the most part. I'm not sure why. I don't think it's because of my strong sentimental attachment to the songs of Pavement, because my love of most of those GBV songs is similarly intense. I think the running thread in why most of them are bad might be because how most of the bands don't seem to get why Pavement and all those songs were so perfect in the first place. I guess I should get right to it...

I'll start with Grandaddy's version of "Here", for both it's ubiquity and the fact that "Here" is by far the most-covered Pavement song in my findings. Grandaddy's version is pretty likeable, they play the song in Pavement's live-version arrangement, ie big and loud. Grandaddy are essentially simultaneously a poor-man's Pavement and an even-poorer-man's Radiohead. I give Grandaddy some credit for fucking around and being a bit playful with the song, to the point of making up their own verse - that's very SM of them. They still manage to suck a lot of the greatness out of the song, and make it sound pretty ordinary.

Still, this is preferable to the horrible crime against music that is Richard Buckner's version of the same song. It pains me to hear this thing - the man basically turns the song into a Smog tune, which is just inexcusable. Contrary to popular opinion, absolutely nothing about Pavement was lifeless and smug, lazy or pathetic, though everything about Smog is. I hate Bill Callahan's drab voice, and Buckner's impression of it is only that much worse than the real thing. This is the outright butchering of a classic pop song, and Buckner should pay for this, do some hard time in indie jail or something. His version with Calexico is only marginally better, if just because Calexico adds a bit of faux-country texture to it, and Buckner sings a bit more melodically.

I can't say that I quite like the Tindersticks version of "Here", but at least I can respect it. They make it sound just like a soft-rock 70's AM radio song, sort of like a Jimmy Webb song. I suppose it's okay as a novelty - though I'm sure that it is not, it sounds a bit like a joke to me.

Holly Golightly's cover of "Box Elder" is pretty nice - they speed it up, make it rock a bit more. It's pretty average indie-pop, nothing objectionable. The same goes for The Wedding Present's version - it's likable, but nothing special. One thing that I noted listening to both of these versions is how when played with distortion and standard tuning, the main riff resembles Velocity Girl's "Sorry Again". Hmm.

Unquestionably the most likable and personalized of all the Pave covers that I've found, Cat Power's rendition of "We Dance" is as lovely as the best of Chan Marshall's work. She makes the song her own without compromising the song's greatness, something none of the other artists mentioned here even come close to. Tom Barman and Friends gives the same song a shot in a live recording and pales in comparison to Cat Power - it's not awful, but it sounds very ordinary and pedestrian. Like most of the covers, it suffers from not being played in the same tuning that Pavement originally played them in. It doesn't take much work to find out what tunings Malkmus used online - I'm not sure why more of these people don't put in a bit more effort and find out so that they can play the songs the way they are meant to be heard.

Certainly the worst victim of the standard-tuning curse is the Dharma Sons version of "AT&T", which sounds like a band of Professional Musicians cleaning up a song which is meant to be intentionally sloppy and punchdrunk. It's just not right. It's like being at a restaurant and getting a well-done steak when you asked for it to be medium rare. You just want to ask the waiter to take it back, you know?

Thankfully, some band called The Miracle of 86 manage to get it right in their cover of "Range Life". It's very true to the original, to the point that they even improvise the last verse and make up their own band disses on the spot, just like Malkmus would do live. Nicely done, guys.

Mallow is another band that I know nothing about, they sound like a garage band, and do a pretty straight-foward cover of "In The Mouth A Desert". They sound like they could be a pretty good Pavement tribute band, really. If they were, I'd hire them to play at my birthday party, if I had one. This goes for Phish as well, though I'm sure they are way out of my price-range. Their live version of "Gold Soundz" feels just about right, but still has a nice feeling of amateurishness about it that brings to mind that of a tribute band. Trey Anastasio messes up the lyrics in the middle, but covers them up in a nice Malkmus-esque way, which wins them some bonus points in my book.

I'm not sure what to make of Bettie Serveert's cover of "Trigger Cut" - it straddles a fine line between being a nice personalized version of the song, and just being boring and average in a way specific to the band itself. I suppose I like their arrangement, but the personality of the band doesn't work for me. My feelings about The Wedding Singers version of "Major Leagues" isn't far off - it's fine enough, I guess, but I just don't like these guys. The Wedding Singers do get points for picking a song from Pavement's least popular LP to cover, though.

Finally, I've got some nice things to say about Static Ritual's live cover of the song that gives this blog it's name, "Flux = Rad". Yes! This rocks! You guys rule! They did it right! Even Pavement themselves couldn't pull this one off live - kudos, whoever you are!