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Pavement
May I speak plainly? I completely miss the appeal of this band. Everything that they do sounds like three guys bashing their way through ordinary chord changes. Stephen Malkmus sings like shit. The band sucks, too. I don’t like the songwriting, either. Why the hell am I listening to this? Pavement are definitely graduates of the ‘dumb-it-down’ school of guitar noize, or maybe they just can’t do any better than this. I’m not sure. Either way, I don’t feel it.
Pavement were lucky to appear at the beginning of the grunge movement, and they ‘furthered’ it by defining a low-fi aesthetic. I can see how this album might hold a certain charm for ne’er-do-wells and slackers, though. It probably provides inspiration to the 13,000,000 other garage bands that sound just like this, too. I only wish that misinformed reviewers would stop making comparisons between Pavement and Neil Young’s Crazy Horse, though. In comparison, Neil Young sounds like a cross between Andres Segovia and George Gershwin. Perhaps the best thing I can say about Slanted and Enchanted is that it shamelessly seems to cop ideas from Mark E. Smith and the Fall. “Two States” and “Flame Throwa” could be dropped into the middle of the Fall’s Slates album and nobody would notice. “Our Singer” is a virtual re-write of the Fall’s “Hip Priest,” only less engaging.
Slanted and Enchanted is the band’s first album, and according to many critics, it is also allegedly one of their best. Needless to say, I don’t plan on investigating much further to determine whether or not that is true. Hearing this has been more than enough for me, so I’ll leave that task to more masochistically inclined reviewers. I don’t want to give the impression that this band sucks any more than they do, though, so I’ll let them sum it up for me, with the lyrics from “Here”; “Your jokes are always bad, but not as bad as this.” ‘Nuff said.
Grade: 
 
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