Our Singer
The debut disc from half-collapsing lo-fi smart-asses Pavement was, at essence, the world’s introduction to Stephen Malkmus. Handsome, affluent, and so sarcastic even his whole truths sounded like halves, the Crown Prince of slackerdom drawled his laconic, ironic, iconic way through Pavement's early records in a disaffected, nasally, half-spoken (or, in several songs, wholly-spoken) voice that almost set itself against the music.
Openly ripping licks from The Fall and Swell Maps, Pavement played a brand of noisy, spiky, spirited indie-pop; all uncoiling, slinking guitar skree collapsing over cardboard-box drums. Debuting with a trio of crappy-sounding EPs —1989's Slay Tracks (1933-1969), 1990's Demolition Plot J-7, and 1991's Perfect Sound Forever— Pavement were anointed part of the burgeoning lo-fi movement. But all the bleeding, badly-recorded tone in the world couldn't camouflage Malkmus's gift with melody.
When It's Underground, Out of Sight?
On Pavement's subsequently-legendary debut LP, Malkmus and fellow guitar/vocal foil Scott 'Spiral Stairs' Kannberg setting their snaky, snarky guitars against each other; all unexpected, Sonic Youth-influenced irregularity. Yet, even at their most strange or difficult, Pavement always resemble a pop-band; every supposedly 'unfriendly' exterior a façade behind which songs of sparkling melody and charming lyrical oddity were plainly lurking.
Malkmus may've dreamt of "being this obscurity, unappreciated in its time," and may've taken the famously-unlikeable Fall as his working model for critical neglect, but said fantasies never became a reality. With songs as winning as "Zürich is Stained," "Here," and "In the Mouth of a Desert" populating their debut album, Pavement's cult-act cover was blown from the get-go. Audiences saw right through the feigned fuzz: Slanted and Enchanted swiftly winning a cult that'd follow Pavement through the rest of the '90s.
Listening with two decades' worth of hindsight, Slanted and Enchanted is an interesting proposition. As Fall-influenced record of noisy indie-rock klang, it's magnificent; a relic of the early-'90s that wears its influences, its mistakes, its own lack of ambition on its sleeve with style. Yet, if you listen to it as classic rock masterpiece adopted into the popular canon, it seems bemusingly slight; a record whose simple pleasures don't always speak greatness through the speakers. Either way, it's still good. Really good. And that's good enough, right?
Record Label: Matador
Release Date: 20 April 1992
