I’ve been reading a lot of old articles about Pavement… all a part of my cyclical obsession with them, a seasonal cycle that’s been unbroken since 1994. For some reason, the spring = Pavementmania for me. I’m like a capistrano swallow…

I’m particularly fond of this one article from The New Yorker, circa Brighten The Corners. It (along with this article from BAM) seems to very eloquently explain a lot of my love for the band, particularly the lyrics of Stephen Malkmus…

choice bits:

The music burrowed through the dense, dissonant textures that were fashionable in eighties underground rock, then took flight in stately melodies that smacked of a sunbaked suburb and a refined pop-record collection. A flat-toned voice sang lyrics that sometimes touched on suburban discontent but more often drifted into unanalyzable abstraction. “Life is a forklift.” “Now my mouth is a forklift. This I ask, that you serve as a forklift too.” What did it mean? No one had any idea. That was the beauty of it. Pavement was credited to “SM, Spinal Stairs, and G. Young”; it looked to be some kind of dangerous Dadaist cult.

Malkmus aims at writing rock songs with history and poetry in them. He has a gift for coining phrases that sound like points in a missing manifesto or like slogans for a movement yet to be named: “the South takes what the North delivers”; “Between here and there is better than either here or there”; “Praise the grammar police.” But no phrase really connects with the next, and Malkmus’s little orations turn cryptic or comic.

A few moments later, the topic, so to speak has switched to the falsetto croon of the lead singer of Rush–“What about the voice of Geddy Lee? How did it get so high? I wonder if he speaks like an ordinary guy?” A band mate chimes in, “I know him, and he does!” Malkmus answers, “Well, you’re my fact-checking cuz.” The idea that such a song could have its own fact checking department in Pavement’s best joke since the Jason Priestley hoax.

Sometimes Malkmus is apparently seeking out words that can’t have appeared together in rock songs before. In “Type Slowly” he sings the phrases “excruciatingly gray,” “leather terrarium,” and “lady, I’m no futurist.” More often, his choices have musical logic behind them. He pins his lines to classic rhythms–for example, Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” pattern, with the “Goode” falling between beats two and three. Malkmus invents ever odder combinations of words to fire up this old syncopation. “Shady Lane,” the catchiest song on the new album, has a gentle, hypnotic melody that keeps slipping off the beat and then falling back into line. Two Johnny B. Goode-like phrases that cause slippage are “emery board” and “worlds collide.” In another song Malkmus sings, “I vent my spleen at the Lord/He is abstract and bored”; this has the same rhythmic contour as, say, Grand Funk Railroad’s “We’re an American band .” Even if the words don’t cohere, meanings emerge.