PAVEMENT
Terror Twilight: Farewell Horizontal MATADOR 9/10
WHEN Pavement split after touring their fifth album, it was hardly a surprise.
They’d always been a strange entity, not really a band at all in the conventional sense. Formed by Stephen ‘SM’ Malkmus and Scott ‘Spiral Stairs’ Kannberg, two Stockton, California friends into hardcore and the gonzo surrealism of The Fall and Captain Beefheart, they were on shaky foundations from the beginning: after recording their first EP, “Slay Tracks 1933-1969”, Malkmus took off to Europe, leaving Kannberg to release it, and was surprised to find a finished copy in a record store on his travels. After success came, they still took breaks after each album without knowing if they would reconvene.
Much of that ambivalence, it seems, stemmed from Malkmus, whose apparent has plenty of both, though it was perhaps less obvious in 1999: Pavement’s noisy abandon and freeform irreverence had long been eroding away, gradually replaced by a stately classicrock feel which didn’t seem quite as hip. Even the group seemed embarrassed by the record, much of it recorded at London’s palatial RAK Studios with the producer of : they played almost nothing from it on their 2010 reunion tour, while Matador are only now releasing this deluxe edition, 14 years after ’ 10thanniversary reissue.
