Slanted and Enchanted (1992)

I saw Pavement in 1995 or thereabouts and I remember it was a very fine show—roaring loud, seductive, insinuating, with surprisingly powerful currents, and always interesting. I surged with the crowd and didn't want it to end, etc. I'm serious. I was still there pounding for more when the house lights went up. They were great. But shortly after that the mystery about the appeal of this quixotic unit ensued as if it had never been cleared up even for a moment. I find it hard to connect with the albums, even the consensus best, such as this debut. Or maybe I find myself forgetting how to. I've been puzzling over it again trying to figure out something to say about this album which I think meant so much to so many. At one time I felt like I was rotating between separate tribes devoted to My Bloody Valentine, Nirvana, and Pavement—blobs of adoration floating around out there and not intersecting much. On the Venn diagram it would be three distinct circles. They all participated to a certain extent, among many others, in a certain vogue of the time for elaborately disaffected song titles, so here: "Jackals, False Grails: The Lonesome Era," "Zurich Is Stained," "Chesley's Little Wrists," "In the Mouth a Desert," "Summer Babe (Winter Version)," so on so forth, there are 14 songs here. There are certainly hooks, things to grab onto, as I just now noticed one welling up out of the end of "No Life Singed Her," but they don't seem to be occurring within the structure of songs as such. To me, at their best, when I think I might be getting it, they are album artists working in the broad 40-minute scope, with a ground of sound based on ramshackle 2 guitars bass drums+ interplay that's almost not sloppy, and from that emerges this little parade of surprises: a chanted chorus that takes on momentum, lots of guitar riffs finding a way, and often an evident willingness to simply let it all ride, or stop, with breaks for adjustments every two or three minutes, meaning that's how the tracks go by. You don't necessarily wait for a certain song but for moments that aren't always quite where you thought you remembered they'd be, but it's all right because there's something interesting coming along now you'd forgotten. It's never quite what you think it is. The cover art is not misleading, I'll put it that way. At the moment, "Two States" is my favorite song—because it's the one playing.