#crooked rain crooked rain

[musicdepott]

Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain

Pavement

Favorites: Silence Kid, Cut Your Hair, Gold Soundz

[greeniery]

so drunk in the August sun

and you’re the kind of girl I like

because you’re empty and I’m empty

and you can never quarantine the past

[girlreviews]

Review #434: Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, Pavement

I always considered Pavement to be the cool (well?) older brother to The Breeders. Same vibe, same energy. I stand by that. I resisted listening to Pavement very deeply and embracing them for a long time based solely on who it always was pushing them on me: terrible men. I didn’t even realize this until I gave this record a listen all the way through and realized I now associated Pavement with a really good dude friend who shares my love of music, treats me like a sister and tells anyone who will listen that I’m the best kind of friend. I once described his style as “90s goofball” that was half the Seattle grunge-scene and half young Adam Sandler. I stand by that too. He loved it. Anyway, I’d forgotten the original associations and resistance to begin with. I like that your brain can do that: forget, and remember to forget to remember.

Some notes. Silence Kid, to me, sounds like Buddy Holly’s Everyday melodically. I can’t help but hear it and expect it to go a particular direction. Of course it doesn’t, because it’s Pavement and their songs have moments of being twinkly and melodic but ultimately insist on descending into discordant chaos. Their lyrics run more like slam poetry than traditional songs with verses, bridges, and choruses. All the same. When I hear Silence Kid, I hear Buddy Holly and I’ll always wonder if it’s on purpose.

Cut Your Hair is probably the one Pavement song that you do know if you know any, it was their only real bonafide “hit”. It’s got some very radio friendly twangy guitar and oooh-oooh-oooh-oooh-oooh-ooooooohs in it. I have never minded the song but certainly never thought it was anything particularly special. It does have a fun little break in the middle where it all gets a bit silly on the guitar. Honestly for me the best part is the opening line:

“Darlin’ don’t you go and cut your hair

Do you think it’s gonna make him change?”

I’m not sure there are any women out there that haven’t had their hair commandeered by the patriarchy in some way, whether systemically by societal expectations or whether on an individualized, sinister, controlling level within a relationship. That’s not what the song is even about, but it’s a perfectly posed question. I actually realize I have tons of stories about ways that women’s hair has been weaponized in abusive relationships or just how it factors into male aggression generally. Some are my stories and some aren’t mine to share, but I’m too exhausted to get into it anyway. Cut your hair if you want. Grow it long. Dye it purple. Shave your head. Do whatever the fuck you want. Do it because you want to and because you like it. Who gives a shit what the men in the world think of your hair. And no, they won’t change. Also, your hair looks fucking great.

In my listens of Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain I remembered a couple of things. One, it’s really very good. Two, I love a shitty vocalist. Why is that? I don’t know, but there’s really something about a dude that can’t sing all that well but tries anyway. Unfair is one of my favorites. I don’t really spend a lot of time trying to figure out the meaning behind lyrics in Pavement songs, but I get the sense that he’s not a huge fan of whoever it was written about. It does end with him shrieking “trash, trash, trash”, so you know. I suppose it’s possible he is singing about literal garbage but I wouldn’t bet twenty bucks on it.

Gold Soundz is a good example of how Pavement and maybe Stephen Malkmus specifically have this way of making songs that sound like they should be “nice” or “pretty” (in the context of 90s grunge), but if you really listen he’s never all that nice and anything complimentary is always kind of backhanded:

“So drunk in the August sun

And you’re the kinda girl I like

Because you’re empty, and I’m empty

And you can never quarantine the past”

I bet she sure feels special, gee whiz! Feels about as good as when a love interest of mine described me as a “lost, broken, little girl” as if it was some kind of compliment. I’m only one of those things, and it is little. Same guy made me miss almost all of Pavement’s set at a festival a few years ago in favor of seeing literally no one else instead. Trash, trash, trash. I did get to see Spit on a Stranger so that was a consolation.

Fillmore Drive is pretty spectacular. It’s a big old noise that’s trying to be quiet. Most of it is about being tired and needing to sleep. The rest of it I really couldn’t tell you, I genuinely do mean it when I feel exasperated and exhausted trying to decipher their lyrics. I think this is why Pavement stir up such challenging feelings for me in general. I like the music, I like the sounds, I like the songs, I think they’re pretty great. But they also feel like a really brazen depiction of what it’s like to be in a relationship with a particular kind of guy — the tortured artist. They’ll never love you as much as they love their own suffering, and so you too will suffer. Tortured artists don’t just torture themselves you know.

I like his shitty voice and I like their big noise. You know whose I like better? Kim Deal and The Breeders. I yield my time.

[mywifeleftme]

317: Pavement // Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain

Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain Pavement 1994, Matador

It’s funny reading reviews from when Pavement first broke out, critics doing their critic thing of referencing aspects of other bands as they tried to get their arms around a genuinely new synthesis of the previous decade’s currents in college/alternative rock. Today the Pavement sound is ubiquitous, a stamp contemporary critics use to shorthand other bands down to size. But those resonances the early critics detected are there, and when I open my ears for them on Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain it can be a way to make a super-familiar album feel new again. The Replacements are probably the clearest analogue in terms of a jokey band of shambling weirdos surrounding a songwriter of genuine brilliance, and I don’t know if you get a “Leaven Now” without the shivering nerves of a “Sixteen Blue,” or a seemingly thrown away gem like “Just Hit Me Lucy” without a “Waitress in the Sky.” Where the Replacements were good musicians who found a kind of proto-slack spontaneity because they often happened to be too drunk to play, Malkmus discovered that was an aesthetic you could live inside if you just surrounded yourself by guys with very limited gifts. You could probably have convinced listeners in the early ‘90s that Pavement hailed from Tucson: the Meat Puppets’ mewling weenie psych seems like a clear antecedent to Malkmus’ wandering, gently ramshackle writing style (“Sleeve of Derision”; “Grown Out Stache”), and I don’t think Green on Red are a bad comparison for something like “Caulk Supplier.” Across the pond, Mark E. Smith famously groused about Pavement’s unpaid debts to the Fall (see “P. 55 Y”; “Leader’s Car / I Can’t Do This”), but I also hear some of Fear & Whiskey-era Mekons on the rowdy “Catholic Gumbo.” And of course, there’s Malkmus’s beloved R.E.M., whose homespun negative capability set the ground for both the heartfelt intuition of “Walmart Moonbeam w/ Fuzz Bridge” and the wilfully inscrutable “Arab V Blunted”—though the influence is more in concept than directly in the sonics, the permission to not always be understood.

Anyway, that’s an impenetrable block of critic-speak for an album that’s best experienced hanging out or driving around. I’m just gonna spin “Your Veneers Suck” and “Web in Front” a few more times and leave it that.

317/365

[gummyartstradingcards]

[macedraws]

inej ghafa ⚓⚔️✨💫

[rastronomicals]

8:56 PM EST November 20, 2023:

Pavement - "Cut Your Hair" From the album Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain (February 14, 1994)

Last song scrobbled from iTunes at Last.fm

File under: Albums lacking Recorder Grot

[alfairb]

Out on my skateboard the night is just humming And the gum smacks are the pulse I'll follow if my walkman fades Well, I got absolutely no one, no one but myself to blame I want a range life, if I could settle down If I could settle down then I would settle down

[starlite-walker]

[belovedindierock]

[top500]

#434 Pavement - Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain (1994)

Coming in with a very textbook indie album for you today. That's not to say this work isn't original or creative, but it frames the alt and indie scene of the 90's well. From what I can gather, the post punk 90's were all about slow and sad rock songs with slow and sad intentions. This is the second of five albums released by Pavement which ended up being their most popular album and contained some of their more well know tracks like Cut your hair and Range life. My initial reactions to this album is that it's firmly in the depressive, question everything, what is my life worth?, type of music. Even when the music is upbeat, the lyrics and vocal style are usually talking about how shitty it is to be where we are right now, and how cool it would be to be anywhere else in the world. This is a sentiment I think a lot of teens and pre teens go through, at least in the US where I grew up and still live. Some of the reviews and critiques of the album and the band focus on them complaining about teenage problems specifically but I think that's a cleaver way for the band to bring more existentialist topics into their music.

The most popular song on this album is Cut your hair which pokes fun at the importance of image in the music industry. I can't think of a more 90's indie band thing to do than make a song that makes fun of the industry that you are a part of. Not only that but it's done in a sarcastic and ironic way that you would only expect a group of lanky white dudes from California to be able to pull off. We do get a good display of lead guitarist Scott Kannberg's style in songs like 5-4=Unity and Stop Breathin' (could there be a more emo name to a song???) which in my mind blends popular rock styles like Red Hot Chilli Peppers with nods to slower and more introspective groups like maybe The Pixies. I've gotta say that this is a pretty well rounded album for a 90's indie band. They paint an immensely clear picture of who they are and what their mission is. I wasn't even alive when this album came out but from what I can gather about the early 90's is that the new generation of people was not super excited about the future that had been laid out for them by their parents and grandparents and the best way to solve it was to get angsty and get loud.

Give it a listen, see what you think.

[ohgodmusic]

I don't remember lying, I don't remember a line I don't remember a word But I don't care, I care, I really don't care Did you see the drummer's hair?

- “Cut Your Hair”, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain (1994), Pavement

[thereminthevesselassessor]

what’s up w pavements obsession with drumming and drummers