RATING: ***½*
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Pavement Brighten the Colours Matador [57:50] by Clarissa Oon
ROCK 'N' ROLL ADVENTURES IN HI-FI And there are precious few of them left too. The electronic invasion of our senses hasn't left many bands untouched. 2 albums back U2 filtered industrial and techno influences on Achtung Baby, followed by a spiel of heavy engineering and mixing culminating in their new album Pop. There's now talk that Billy Corgan is thinking of using electronic loops for the Smashing Pumpkins's next album. And really, given that today's cutting edge music exploits all the twists of modern technology (Björk, Tricky, Orbital), is it any suprise that the best rock bands are taking that route to spice up the ole guitar-drum-bass combo? For those that hold out, a little more than good songwriting is needed to capture the familiar '90s zeitgeist: a sense of that channel-surfing whirl, the pulsing of sound bites. The energy of multi-media cut-and-paste, sense and non-sense. Let's start with lyrics no one can understand. A familiar reference here, a meaningful insight there. Then it drifts past you. R.E.M. does it too, but Pavement does it better. Pavement's lyrics are legendary in alt-rock circles for their obliqueness. (They are also known, a little more infamously, for the few bits that criticize other rock stars.) But Pavement fans who listen carefully to the songs will tell you that the lyrics -- in their own quirky, brilliant, unexpected way -- are funny, intelligent and sometimes quite sad. And you don't need to be a Pavement fan to feel that on Brighten The Corners. Take 'Shady Lane', the album's most readily infectious song. So you think Stephen Malkmus is just singing in his goofy way about how everybody needs a shady lane (think pastoral cliché). Then you listen again, and he's singing, 'a redder shade of neck on a whiter shade of trash/and this emory board is giving me a rash.' In the next line, he sings to this girl, 'you're so beautiful to look at when you cry' -- and suddenly pulls back on her, 'freeze don't move/you've been chosen as an extra in the movie adaptation of the sequel to your life.' (A *shady* lane all right.) But 'Shady Lane' is just the tip of the iceberg. Some of the other songs are more complex and yet somehow less irreverent. Like the beautiful, epic 'Type Slowly', a love song of quite wondrous proportions ('Sheri you smell different...for you morning comes so easy), with its slow, drawn out melody which Stephen Malkmus emotes with a rare, almost-searing honesty. Brighten The Corners is Pavement's fifth album to date, and they've moved far enough from their lo-fi beginnings to create an almost classic rock sound, with the kind of riffs lots of bands would kill to have. Yet they haven't sacrificed their little drifts and scratchings, mixing clean melodies with rough edges. Like the nice stray bits of fuzz on 'Stereo' and the little lulls in the melody, building to a cranked-up chorus. Generally, Pavement excels at winding up or down from fast to slow, whether between tracks or within songs themselves, and that is skilfully exploited by the track sequencing on the album. Like the transition from the edgy catchiness of the up-tempo 'Date With Ikea' to the mellow 'Old To Begin', with just the right hint of guitar dissonance carried over from the previous song. Other stellar moments include the sardonic humour of 'We Are Underused' ('You've been a great host/the roast was perfectly prepared/now I know you cared'), and the anthemic 'Starlings of the Slipstream'. In a sense, the timing of the release of both U2's Pop and Pavement's Brighten The Corners speaks volumes. One self-consciously takes the weight of an electronically-inflicted world on its shoulders, both musically and lyrically. The other is quite happy to do its own thing with a stray chord here and a strange line there, somehow cluing into all our mixed-up sensibilities, deconstructing all our overly-familiar reference points. And best of all, they get good rock 'n' roll out of it.
Clarissa Oon likes mud and has a passion for nudging. In her spare time she wears her trousers rolled.
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