Tag Archives: slanted and enchanted

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

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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.

#1308: Pavement – Summer Babe (Winter Version)

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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.

#1030: Pavement – Perfume-V

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Slanted and Enchanted. Regarded by many to be Pavement’s best album. Regarded as one of the best indie-rock albums of the ’90s. I believe a few members of the band look fondly upon the album and the time it was made themselves. But personally, it’s low down on my ranking. Not that I think it’s bad. It has a few of their best songs on there. But then I hear how the songs are performed live compared to how they were released, and they just sound so much better in a live context. To be fair, I did listen to Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain before going back to it, so that may have played a part in my judgement.

When I did go through Slanted for that first time in 2012/2013, ‘Perfume-V’ wasn’t a track that I considered to be much of a highlight. Then again, I didn’t really like the whole lo-fi feeling the album was going for. Again, it just didn’t sound like Crooked Rain. It probably wasn’t until some years later where I watched videos of Pavement performing the track live, particularly this performance from their initial 2010 reunion tour and this from their ’92 Reading show, that I thought, “Hmm. This song’s actually pretty great.” It’s quite intense in its own short way. Gets a bit shoegazy at some points. No solos, no wandering breakdowns like you can get in many a Pavement track. It’s two verses, two choruses a bridge and then it’s outta there.

Not very clear on what it’s about. Contains the cryptic and surreal lyricism that Stephen Malkmus is known for. But to hazard a guess, I think it actually may be about a narrator who’s having severe guilt and a bit of an existential crisis after having a one-night stand with a prostitute. They question whether these one-nighters would actually be able to fulfil them for the long-term. When the sun comes up and the rays come down on the scene that’s happened on the bed, the narrator can’t help but be attracted to what they see, but still doesn’t feel too great about it. The rest of the lyrics is anyone’s guess. Well, all of what I’ve said is my guess too. But all in all, it’s always a good time when this one comes on shuffle.