‘Starlings of the Slipstream’ is the penultimate track on Pavement’s Brighten the Corners album, released back in 1997. I can’t recall if I’ve ever said on here, but usually I switch between Crooked Rain… and Terror Twilight as my go-to listen-through Pavement albums. But over the years, Brighten the Corners has been slowly creeping up and calmly nudging it’s way into pole position too. My view, you can’t go wrong with any Pavement album. I’ve enjoyed a good chunk of Brighten… for the longest time. But as I’ve revisited over the years, with the big 3-0 approaching and being 30 now, the record’s become a great comfort. Being the ‘turning 30’ album it is, I can sort of relate with Stephen Malkmus who was going through the same stage of life at the time of making the album, even with surrealism and lyrical wordplay he tends to incorporate in his songs.

‘Starlings…’ was originally known as ‘The Werewolf Song’, assumedly because of the “ah-woooo” refrains during the chorus, and was introduced as so when the band played the Tibetan Freedom Concert in 1996. They did this performance on either 15th or 16th June, and a month later, they were in a studio in North Carolina recording the music that would end of being Brighten the Corners. Somewhere in between, Stephen Malkmus found the time to get some lyrics down to set amidst the music. Or maybe even during the recording sessions he did, the band usually got the performances to tape first and he would lay down his vocals afterwards. And with the final lyrics, you get a set of words that aren’t very easy to break down and get to the nitty-gritty about. They’re vague in typical Malkmus fashion. But just the song title of ‘Starlings of the Slipstream’ is enough to bring an image my head, much like a lot of other lyrics you’ll find in the track. So maybe it’s more about the imagery in this song, rather than the meaning.

So it would be the logical move to go through this song line-by-line to try and express what imagery’s conjured up by each respective lyric. But I feel that would kind of be a waste of my time, and you probably wouldn’t want to read that either. Rather, I’ll just list the few things that stick out to me when I think about the song. Overall, the chord changes and the stopping/starting motion the music holds in the verses. Each smack of the crash cymbal with the guitar strum feels very releasing. And then those stop-starts transition into the werewolf choruses where Malkmus recites the song’s title. Those moments are quite entrancing in their own ways too. The way Malkmus intensifies his vocal on the “I put a spy-cam in a sorority” line. Didn’t need to do it, comes from out of nowhere, but always grateful that he chose to sing it that way. And I like how the track just falls into this noisy outro with two guitars wailing between notes before everything fizzles out to an end. Somewhere I read a comment that referred to ‘Starlings…’ as the song that sounds like the final track but isn’t. And while I got a laugh and did think that the comment was sort of right, it does the best job as the second-last one. Gives us that last bit of levity before ‘Fin’ really ends the album on a poignant note.