Pavement: Brighten The Corners (Nicene Creedence Edition)
[Matador Records]
[xrr rating= 4.7/5]
Reviewed by: Christian Hagen
For those of us who give a shit, one of the more complicated questions of today’s music scene is just who or what birthed this oh-so-popular modern indie rock sound. Critics tend to be hyperbolic, and many of them will tell you that Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted was the absolute birth of indie rock. And while this may be easy to say (and may in fact be true), this eliminates all albums that came before it, and, frankly, most of the indie bands today probably spent more time spinning The Pixies, The Smiths, Joy Division, The Cure, or The Velvet Underground than any Pavement album.
Thus, we beg an essential question: What is indie rock? The simple answer (and the only one I can wrap my head around right now) is that it’s not so much about the music, as there are lots of bands with completely unique musical sounds that fall under the indie rock umbrella. Indie rock today is about an attitude, a budget range, and, if we’re being honest, a sales market. Indie rock, as much as we hate to admit it, is now for the more musically educated, the “hipsters” who want to hear something his or her friends have never heard before.
But if you didn’t know any of this, and you listened to a Pavement record for the first time, you’d probably think indie rock belonged to the parents’ basement crowd, the high school dropouts whose lives consist of drinking, goofing off, and rocking out.
Such is the idyllic world of Pavement, a band so unique that labeling them as the godfathers of indie rock seems vaguely reductive. On Brighten The Corners, one of the band’s later releases before their 1999 breakup, they sound pretty much the same as they always did. Fuzzy guitar solos, chunky bass lines, and Stephen Malkmus’s wholly unmelodic voice that ranges from monotone talk-singing to yelping, straining upper-register yelling that’s always either just inside or outside of the key. The songs ramble along, sometimes slowing down for Malkmus’s internalized lyrics that he somehow manages to jam right in the listener’s face with every line. Pavement aren’t an angry band, a chilled-out band, or wildly experimental band. They are a band that wants to have fun and make music whether anyone wants to listen or not. And somehow, either because of or in spite of that swagger, Brighten The Corners, like every Pavement album, is its own classic, one which divides fans who argue over which is the defining record of the band’s career. They achieved great debate without diversifying much beyond their original sound, that sound which supposedly birthed a thousand indie rock bands for years after they dissolved into the ether.
There are many reasons to explore Pavement today. For one, with the rise of independent musicians, it’s likely that many people just want to know what the hell indie rock IS. But, for any self-respecting rock music fan, the best reason to explore Pavement now is that Matador Records has been meticulously re-releasing their albums, each completely remastered and packed (I mean, seriously packed) with bonus material. Brighten The Corners (Nicene Creedence Edition) is just the latest of these, and, out of the original 12-track release, we get a whopping 44 tracks, from b-sides and outtakes to singles and several live sessions (plus two takes of the previously unreleased “Space Ghost Theme”, which will surely appease classic Cartoon Network fans). While not the most critically-acclaimed or respected release of the band’s career, Brighten The Corners (Nicene Creedence Edition) is a must-own for Pavement fans.
But more importantly, for those who’ve been wondering where in the hell all this indie crap came from, look no further, because the godfathers of indie rock are right here.
This post previously appeared on Pajiba
