By David Renard
Dear listeners,
This past Friday one of the more bonkers music documentaries ever to hit screens arrived: “Pavements,” the director Alex Ross Perry’s exploration of both the ’90s indie band Pavement and the ways we make myths around musicians. I talked to Perry and the Pavement frontman Stephen Malkmus about how the movie ended up taking the wild form that it did, using split-screen images to show Pavement’s most recent reunion tour as well as a jukebox musical (real), a Hollywood biopic (fake) and a museum exhibition (a bit of both). The Times critic Alissa Wilkinson called it all “delightfully destabilizing.”
Along with its meta pranks, though, “Pavements” is full of great music. In our interview, Perry said he wanted the movie to “perform like a two-hour Pavement concert where it goes from an achingly beautiful, tender song, to a very loud and bratty punk song, to just an endless, sprawling, loose jam.” It’s an apt description of the band’s catalog, which filtered avant-garde rock influences — like the Velvet Underground, Pere Ubu (R.I.P. David Thomas), Can and especially the Fall — through the suburban California sensibility of Malkmus and Scott Kannberg, a.k.a. Spiral Stairs. “The whole record collection kind of melts into what you are,” Malkmus says in the documentary.
You can’t talk about Pavement in 2025 without getting into the story of “Harness Your Hopes,” a non-album track that was boosted by the Spotify and TikTok algorithms until it became Pavement’s best-known song for younger fans. (“That’s really like a crazy, crazy thing that happened,” Malkmus said in a phone interview. “That’s pretty fun.”) The band’s record label had Perry shoot a music video to capitalize on its success; it features Sophie Thatcher from “Yellowjackets” and references all of Pavement’s old videos from the ’90s.
If you like that one, just think what they actually put on the records! Here’s a Pavement primer where the beautifully tender rubs shoulders with the loud and bratty and the endless, loose jams.
Hi-ho, Silver, ride,
Dave
Listen along while you read.
1. “Debris Slide”
Even in its knottiest early days, Pavement had a pop side that poked through the noise. “Box Elder,” off the self-released debut “Slay Tracks,” caught the attention of the British band the Wedding Present, who covered it. And this highlight from the “Perfect Sound Forever” EP remains a staple of Pavement’s live shows. The guitars warp and squeal, but the “bop bop bah-dah-bah” chorus invites singalongs.
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2. “Summer Babe (Winter Version)”
The first track on “Slanted and Enchanted” is Pavement at its coolest, with a head-nodding tempo, Malkmus’s deadpan talk-singing and vividly offbeat lyrics: “She’s mixin’ cocktails with a plastic-tipped cigar.”
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3. “Here”
The slacker’s lament: “I was dressed for success / but success it never comes.” Surprisingly, the line that best sums up this song’s mood is “Come join us in a prayer.” But the live version for John Peel’s radio show proved that “Here” could rock if it needed to.
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4. “Frontwards”
Having “so much style that it’s wasted” is a pretty good brag. This cut from the 1992 “Watery, Domestic” EP — four top-tier Pavement songs, no skips — is punctuated by stinging lead guitar and provides the documentary with its opening disclaimer: “The stories you hear, you know they never add up.”
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5. “Silence Kid”
Or is it “Silence Kit”? Depends which part of the album art you look at; Pavement never liked to be pinned down. From the opening notes of this track, it became clear that the “Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain” LP was on a different wavelength from “Slanted,” putting a lot more classic rock into the mix. The vocal melody seems partially cribbed from “Everyday” by Buddy Holly — a far cry from the Fall.
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6. “Cut Your Hair”
Pavement had one of its biggest alt-rock hits with “Cut Your Hair,” full of crunchy guitars and catchy “ooh, ooh, oohs.” It’s very Malkmus to write a song that could actually get played on MTV and end it by singing “career” over and over until the syllables are drained of meaning.
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7. “Gold Soundz”
Pavement sometimes went in a more jangle-pop direction — clean guitars, shiny melodies. (They love R.E.M.) “Gold Soundz” is jangle-Pavement at its best, with some of Malkmus’s least cryptic sentiments: “So drunk in the August sun and you’re the kind of girl I like.”
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8. “Grounded”
“Wowee Zowee,” from 1995, might be the group’s most divisive LP. To its champions, the 18-track, three-sided record (the fourth was left blank) is an indie-rock “White Album,” while its detractors find it wildly uneven. The high points, though, are undeniably high, like “Grounded,” with its chiming intro and a chorus that can give chills.
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9. “AT&T”
The two singles from “Wowee,” “Rattled by the Rush” and “Father to a Sister of Thought,” were both slower songs that didn’t really catch on, although Malkmus says in “Pavements” that he wasn’t being intentionally perverse and believed they were hits. (“I think I was smoking a lot of grass at the time,” he explains.) Maybe they should have gone with this bouncier number, with absurd lyrics (“My heart is made of gravy”) that include what I’m assuming is rock’s only shout-out to the Javits Center.
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10. “Stereo”
Fun one. Malkmus delivers a laid-back white-boy rap that might fit on an early Beck record, with goofy wordplay (“drown you in a crick in the neck of the woods”) and an investigation into the voice of Geddy Lee: “How did it get so high? I wonder if he speaks like an ordinary guy?” The band plays with dynamics here, too, pausing a beat at the end of each verse before blasting into the big chorus.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
11. “Folk Jam”
“Terror Twilight,” released in 1999, the year Pavement broke up, was generally considered a letdown. Perry’s documentary quickly breezes past it with the onscreen title, “One last record.” But its best songs still hold up; “Folk Jam” sounded great on the reunion tour, its country-ish picking alternating with spacier sections. “Pardon my birth, I just slipped out” is a lyrical gem.
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The Amplifier Playlist
“Going Back to Pavement’s Gold Sounds” track list
Track 1: “Debris Slide”
Track 2: “Summer Babe (Winter Version)”
Track 3: “Here”
Track 4: “Frontwards”
Track 5: “Silence Kid”
Track 6: “Cut Your Hair”
Track 7: “Gold Soundz”
Track 8: “Grounded”
Track 9: “AT&T”
Track 10: “Stereo”
Track 11: “Folk Jam”
Bonus Tracks
After Pavement’s split, Malkmus released several albums both solo and with his band the Jicks. He’s currently on tour with the indie supergroup the Hard Quartet. Kannberg released two LPs under the name Preston School of Industry and four more as Spiral Stairs. The bassist Mark Ibold went on to play with Sonic Youth in the 2000s, and his pre-Pavement noise-rock band Dustdevils is underappreciated.
The post Going Back to Pavement’s Gold Sounds appeared first on New York Times.
