Tag Archives: pavement

#1415: Pavement – Trigger Cut/Wounded-Kite at :17

Leave a reply

Ween-Pavement-Ween-Pavement. How the past few days have been going. Don’t fret, there’s no Ween song coming straight after this one. It will be by Blur again. Today’s Pavement song comes from the band’s Slanted and Enchanted album, their debut from 1992. Haven’t written about a lot of songs from that one. My experience with Slanted.. is I heard the album years ago and didn’t like how it sounded compared to Crooked Rain… and the other following albums. As time went on, I’d watch the band performing songs of the album live through videos on YouTube, which then made me appreciate the studio recordings a lot more when I’d revisit them. That happened with ‘Perfume-V’. It happened with ‘Summer Babe’. The same thing happened with ‘Trigger Cut’ too. Looks like that would be the trick in getting me to appreciate the album as a whole. Whether or not I will, you’ll never find out, ’cause Slanted… won’t appear on the blog after this. But I’m inclined to like anything Pavement-wise, so we’ll say that I eventually will.

Back in 2018, Stephen Malkmus was gearing up to release Sparkle Hard with the Jicks. A lot of promo and social media activity was going on in that lead-up. At that point, I probably didn’t think all that much of ‘Trigger Cut’. Slanted… was the one Pavement album I never really went back to then. But during that time, and I’m pretty sure it was the video down below, Pitchfork uploaded a Stephen Malkmus acoustic set to their channel. He played ‘Trigger Cut’ as the last number, and that performance there was really all I needed to be swayed. There’s Malkmus with a 12-string guitar, just his voice with the notes ringing out. The melody popped out a whole lot more. It was like hearing the song for the first time again. I think it might as well have been, I probably hadn’t heard the original for a while up to then. So I saw the light, went back to the original, took it for what it was and found myself having another Pavement track to enjoy whenever need be.

‘Trigger Cut’ is the second track on Slanted…, the two-punch after the ‘one’ provided by opener ‘Summer Babe’. A very fine way to start your album off with two lo-fi indie power pop classics. Will admit, I don’t know what the song’s about. Haven’t built that close connection with it like I have with other Pavement songs. I could look on Genius, but even then I think a lot of ‘contributors’ on that place are usually reaching. All I know for certain is it’s all so catchy. So, so, catchy. Malkmus sings really nicely over the instrumentation. Eccentric drummer Gary Young keeps the rhythm pretty straight for the verses before bringing in the fills and thrashing crash cymbals in the chorus. The call-response vocal structure between Malkmus and Spiral Stairs in those choruses are a hoot, and Malkmus’s “Sha-la-la / Ooh-ooh” vocalizations during the break are arguably the best part of the entire thing. The instrumental ‘Wounded Kite…’ section at the song’s end is a slice of the Slanted… outtake ‘Nothing Ever Happens’. Did it need to be there? Probably not. But the three minutes would feel incomplete without it somehow.

#1413: Pavement – Transport Is Arranged

Leave a reply

I sort of remember hearing Pavement’s ‘Transport Is Arranged’ the first time. Think it was sometime in early to mid-2013. Makes me either 17 or 18 years of age. I thought it was a weird one initially. In fact, I’m not entirely sure I liked it all that much. The track’s the third to start playing on the band’s Brighten the Corners album from 1997. The one-two punch of ‘Stereo’ and ‘Shady Lane’ was something I was already very familiar with by 2013. The two numbers were the third and second Pavement songs I’d ever heard respectively, having seen their videos on MTV2 in the mid-2000s. So fast-forward, I’m going through Brighten the Corners. The ‘J vs. S’ instrumental section of ‘Shady Lane’ finishes. Now I’m officially in unfamiliar territory. I was not in Kansas anymore. And ‘Transport…’ begins with Malkmus and his guitar alongside… a Mellotron? It wasn’t what I was expecting, that’s for sure.

To the 17/18-year-old me, ‘Transport…’ was the song where I thought Malkmus was really trying to actually sing, but he was failing. He was bad. That was my snobby attitude toward his vocals. Particularly, how he sang ‘Set me up with your nIeEce’, but generally how he was just pitchy all over the place. It put me off. But there were still little moments that stuck in my head, the line “I know, you’re my lady” did for some reason, just the melody of it. And after a few more listens over a period of time, I put the snobbery to the side, enjoyed the track for what it was and got to the point where I was humming it to myself on the train. At this point in time, it seems so silly I was uptight about those kinds of things back in those days ’cause it’s really Malkmus’s vocals that are usually the most endearing parts of any Pavement song. ‘Transport…’ is still a weirder one, though. ‘Least on the musical side. It’s made up of three verses, two of which end with an utterance of the song title, and no chorus, separated by ascending / descending guitar runs with a wandering instrumental jam falling into a hard-rock breakdown in the middle. It’s like a little trip, a little journey. Which I think ties into what the song’s about, from the little I can personally make out from the lyrics, anyway.

Well, let’s first begin with the title. ‘Transport Is Arranged’. Well, I guess transport is usually arranged for musicians who need to travel around various countries to get to the venues they’re playing in, the accommodation where they’re staying for a night, etc. And I think the song is another of those “life on the road” songs that Malkmus sometimes does, but there’s the added angle of trying to build and maintain a relationship while also living the life of a touring musician. The narrator’s good at his craft. But when it comes to romance, there’s something lacking. “A voice coach taught me to sing / He couldn’t teach me to love”. The first two verses appear to tackle the situation. But by the third verse, it seems that the narrator’s comfortable in the solitary state they’re in, navigating their way through life effortlessly, sometimes with the assistance of a tour bus or other provided transportation. Maybe I’m just looking into it too much, and it’s all just a word exercise. You never really know when it comes to Stephen Malkmus, and I think that’s what gets me wanting more whenever a Malkmus things comes around.

#1308: Pavement – Summer Babe (Winter Version)

1 Reply

Who knew there were so many Pavement songs beginning with the letter ‘S’? Feels like I’ve written about 20 of them. The number is probably much smaller than that. But it appears that this’ll be the last one in this section. And there’s an irony that the trend finishes off on an album opener, the first track on Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted, the band’s debut album, released in 1992. I’ve relayed my personal opinion of the record in a previous post. Though if you’re not up for reading that, it boils down to me not liking the lo-fi feel of the album and preferring the songs on there a lot more when I see them being played live. It took seeing a live performance of ‘Perfume-V’ to get me into that number, and the story’s very much the same for my eventual appreciation of ‘Summer Babe’.

After downloading Slanted… in 2013 or so and not caring so much for it, there would be times when I was online and navigating various music places that ‘Summer Babe’ would be recognised as “one of the best songs of the ’90s” or “the greatest indie rock song ever”. It left me wondering what I’d missed. There was once a performance of the song the band did at the Hollywood Bowl, during their first reunion shows in 2010, available on YouTube. Alas, it doesn’t seem to be up anymore. That would have been a nice one to link. In fact, I think you can see the person filming that video in this video of the same performance. That’s as close as we can get to it. And there’s this take of the track from 2014 when Stephen Malkmus was on tour with his Jicks entourage. Listening to those, and then listening to the official album track afterwards, it was like, “Yeah, I get it now.” Sometimes it takes that live context to understand where a song’s coming from.

In comparison to those live shows where the track is performed with more of an emphatic energy and a wider display in vocal range, similar to the sound of Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain which would follow (and which I’m more a fan of), ‘Summer Babe’ as a studio recording is much drier, with Stephen Malkmus sounding nonchalant as anything. But despite the production, or lack of it, whatever you want to say, I can’t look past its catchiness. Three chords is all it needs, revolving around a chord progression of D-A-G, over which Malkmus potentially sings about relationships while referencing Vanilla Ice and evoking images of shiny robes and protein delta strips. I say “potentially sings” because, like I’ve mentioned many a time before, Stephen Malkmus doesn’t make things too obvious with his words. I feel like I had to be around at the time of the song’s initial release to truly understand why the song gets the accolades it does. But I do enjoy it a lot. If I’m not singing along to the ‘summer babe’s during the end, I’m probably having a bad day.

#1289: Pavement – Stop Breathin’

Leave a reply

After this track here, there’ll be only one more left to write about from Pavement’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, the band’s second album, released in 1994. Feels like I’ve been covering a lot of Stephen Malkmus-associated material in this section of this series lately, but I can’t complain. I’m a big, big admirer of the guy’s work. Regarding the tracks from Crooked Rain…, the first I shared my thoughts on was the “hit” single ‘Cut Your Hair’ in 2014. And a few other nunbers have popped up on here along the way. Just have to click on that ‘crooked rain crooked rain’ tag below to see them. Now we’re at the album’s third track, ‘Stop Breathin’. The chorus in this one got to me on that first listen, so much so that I remember singing it loudly on my out of my student flat and to a seminar in my first year of university. The whole track was an instant thumbs-up.

Following the one-two punch of ‘Silence Kit/d’ and ‘Elevate Me Later’, whose combination set an immediately catchy tone to the record’s opening moments, ‘Stop Breathin’ then arrives as the sobering, meditative, contemplative number to slow things down a peg. Set to a 6/8 waltz time with wonky-sounding arpeggiated chords created by an unusual guitar tuning, Malkmus depicts the scene of a tennis match and blends it with warlike imagery. At least that’s how it goes in the first verse. The second I’ve never been able to pin down quite as well. Overall, I’ve come to think the song is told from the point-of-view of this tennis player who’s really going through it on the court and wishes that the crowd stop breathing, as if that’ll help them perform any better. The narrator loses, left a broken mess, conceding to his father that the pressure was too much. Though I could also be completely wrong. That’s a sort of the surface level way to look at it. But it’s my way of understanding. It’s definitely a very alluring characteristic of the song, the fact that what it’s about isn’t so cut and dried.

The other notable detail is how the lyrical part of the track actually finishes two minutes into the duration, after which the song turns into an instrumental jam – directly influenced by ‘Sing Swan Song’ by seminal German experimental rock band Can. There’s an interview out there I swear I’ve read where Malkmus says this straight up, but I can’t find it after trying so hard to(o). I remember being determined to memorise the chord changes that occur during this breakdown, exactly when and where they happened. I think I watched a few live performances to get it down, and it felt great once I did. Was like an accomplishment. I think this jam is pretty much performed by Malkmus, bass guitarist Mark Ibold and Steve West on the drums. Genius gives a nice little description of what goes down in it. I do find it funny that it does sounds like Malkmus just sort of stops playing the guitar when the drums come in again in that final finish, disregarding any sense of timing, leaving Ibold to properly ramp things off with the bass.

#1285: Pavement – Stereo

2 Replies

And here it is. The third track by Pavement that I’d ever heard. ‘Cut Your Hair’ was the first. ‘Shady Lane’, second. One day, either when I was 11 or 12 and flicking through the music channels like I did on the regular in those days, I switched back to MTV2 and playing on the screen was the video for ‘Stereo’. It was nearing its end, but there was just enough time left that the graphic stating ‘PAVEMENT – STEREO’ popped up on the screen. It left me with a good feeling. “Hey, it’s that band again.” The song sounded great. But it seemed that whenever the video was playing, I’d be on another channel. I’d switch back to MTV2 on some days, and there it was again getting to the end. I don’t think it was until YouTube was a thing that I was able to watch the whole video. It also revealed to me that Stephen Malkmus was the singer in the band, as it showed him fully miming the words. He’s headless in ‘Shady Lane’, so I still didn’t know, and in ‘Cut Your Hair’ all the members are mouthing the lyrics. Malkmus wasn’t playing the guitar, though, so I thought Bob Nastanovich was the second guitarist for a while.

‘Stereo’ is the first track, the enigmatic opener on Pavement’s Brighten the Corners – the band’s fourth album, released in 1997. You’re probably well aware of this now, because it’s the third time I’ve written about a song from the record during this ‘S’ section. A quarter of the songs from the record begin with ‘S’, I guess that’s neat. I call the song “enigmatic” because, really, trying to think and gain an understanding on what it’s about would probably be a futile task. stephen Malkmus conjures up phrases and words that sound good together, coming up with lines that’ll make you chuckle. The “What about the voice of Geddy Lee” one is a classic in the indie-sphere. “Pigs, they tend to wiggle when they walk” is one way to start a song off, let alone a whole album. And of course there’s the chorus, “I’m on the stereo/Stereo/My baby, baby, babe/Gave me malaria/Hysteria”. All very much a stream of consciousness feel throughout, and yet if you’re singing along once you get the lyrics down, the words roll right off the tongue.

If I were to hazard a guess at what the song’s going for, I think it’s Malkmus’s way of trying to make a radio hit while making fun of the idea at the same time. The random nature of the words is the main signifier for this thought, and the way he caps it all off with “Lots of details to discern, lots of details” after providing a lyric that doesn’t really need to be analysed at all seems very tongue-in-cheek. The way he sings “Wave to the camera/It took a giant ramrod” using the “Ring a Ring ‘o Roses” melody, or the “na-na-na-na boo boo” one, sounds like he’s even making fun of himself and us with his delivery. And then there’s the intro and the instrumental breaks, which consist of erratic strums and picking on the electric guitars alongside some harmonics to boot, while the rhythm section keeps things nice and sturdy. In all those ways, it’s a song that shouldn’t work, but does. It was released as the first single from Brighten the Corners, two weeks before the album was released. It got to #48 in the UK. Maybe not a complete commercial smash. But it’s a beloved Pavement number, probably one of their most played out on the road, and I’ve got a liking towards it too. If that wasn’t made clear already.