I’ve Been Waiting, Anticipating

To answer a question I’ve been asked pretty frequently lately: Yeah, I’m glad that Matador are finally releasing Pavement’s Slow Century DVD. It not an intense feeling of joy, or anything – I was excited when they announced this over two years ago, so I feel a bit jaded about this by now. Trust me – when the thing comes out on October 22nd, I’ll be fucking ecstatic.

Matador is also releasing a special remastered edition of Slanted + Enchanted on that day too, which will include all of the b-sides from that record (such as “So Stark (You’re A Skyscraper)”, which I’m glad will finally see a wider release), the Watery Domestic EP, and some outtakes. I’m interested in hearing the outtakes, one of which is unreleased, though I suspect I might already have it. The thing that really bothers me is that this is a single disc set, which means all of this will be tacked on after “Our Singer”, ruining the conclusion of the album. I know I’m very anal about this sort of thing, but if part of the reason for this reissue is the idea that S+E is a brilliant, classic album; then why would you want to compromise part of why the album is so great to begin with? “Our Singer” is one of my favorite album-ending songs ever, and it’s sort of sad that some people will be buying this album for the first time and won’t get to just have the album end where it’s meant to end. I’ve got the same reservations about Watery Domestic, which I think works perfectly as a 4 song, 11 minute record. Maybe I’m just being silly – it’s not as though they are putting the original editions of either of those records out of print.

I’m also a bit suspicious about the remastering of the record – one of the things that makes S+E what it is is the *sound* of the recording. I don’t really want it to be changed, it’s fine as it is. Hopefully they won’t do anything too drastic to the mix, and just do some superficial cleaning-up; i.e. mastering the record to a louder volume and boosting the dynamic range. That wouldn’t bother me very much at all.