Another Form of Relief

The Pavement reunion tour is now well and truly on it’s way around the world.  The band is just now wrapping up it’s dates in Australasia, and will next be onto Japan before heading on to Europe and the US.  Reports from these early dates seem good, with some pretty spectacular setlists being played each night.

To coincide with this, the lovely people at Filthy Little Angels have put together a Pavement cover album entitled (what else?) Show Me A Word That Rhymes With Pavement.  Collecting 17 artists, including Horowitz, Cats and Cats and Cats, Benjamin Shaw, Billy Ruffian and a whole bunch of other hip and happening types.  The compilation covers both obvious and more obscures ends of the Pavement back catalogue.  As is inevitable with things like this, some work better than others, but it certainly hits a lot more than it misses.

MP3 Cats and Cats and Cats – Cut Your Hair

MP3 The International Karate Plus – Box Elder

The entire 17 track Show Me A Word That Rhymes With Pavement album is available now as a free download from Filthy Little Angels.

Pop quiz, hotshot. Gold Soundz an excellent song by Pavement that’s been remastered. The remastered one is below, the original is above. Can you hear the difference?

Me either.

The remastered Gold Soundz is taken from the upcoming best-of entitled Quarantine the Past. I hate best-ofs so I’ll be sticking with my demastered versions. For those that do want it, it will apparently be MID-PRICED. I’ve no idea what that means either.

I wonder just how many posts in a row can have at least some tenuous Pavement connection on here.

Today we have a cover of Box Elder from Pet Ghost Project. I have to admit to not being familiar with with Pet Ghost Project, which is apparently just one man by the name of Justin Stivers. Which is pretty remarkable given the kind of full band sound that he manages to evoke with this cover. Box Elder is one of my favourite Pavement songs, ticking all of the boxes of what made the band great. It takes a hell of a lot to come up with something even half as good as the original, but Stivers manages to make it his own.

For those keeping up with the Pavement reunion scores at home, it’s now confirmed that there will “definitely will be” UK gigs in the “summer time”.

I wasn’t a fan of Pavement when the band broke up in 1999. It was around then that I discovered them after a friend scribbled the words Date With Ikea on a list of musical recommendations. Two or three years after that I’d collected each album and would be brave enough to consider myself a “fan”. Even if I never owned this awesome t-shirt.

Even amongst the recent glut of bands getting back together, Pavement weren’t one of the ones I saw it happening with. Indeed, the original break-up was so acrimonious that some of the members only learnt of the split by reading about it online. Yet over the last couple of days, news has appeared from nowhere that the band will reform for a festival in New York next September and embark on a world tour of “major cities”. Quite how extensive this tour will be, I have no idea, but if it doesn’t at least include a London date, a lot of people will be marching on the Domino office.

Poor Scott Kannberg. He’ll forever be “the other one” when it comes to any discussions of Pavement, which is a little unfair given his vital contribution to that band. Malkmus may be the one everybody knows, but it was largely the combination of the two of them that made it work. He’s dabbled around a bit in the ten years since Pavement split, releasing a couple of Preston School of Industry albums. Both were decent, neither were spectacular. Like Malkmus, it seems to be a constant battle to differentiate oneself away from the Pavement connection that seems doomed to failure.

The Real Feel will be Kannberg’s first solo album as Spiral Stairs. It’s an odd decision when you notice the twenty or so people that worked on it listed on his website. But a name is just a name, and perhaps a shift away from the Preston name would be beneficial. The only problem is that musically it still sounds just like the previous band. It’s by no means bad, but Maltese Terrier would feel right at home on either Preston album. Perhaps the full album will open up a range of new delights. But odds are, it’s still not going to be Pavement.

The Real Feel will be out on October 20 (little early for the promo track, no?) via Matador Records.

I was always under the impression that Copy Haho were actually called Copy Halo. I’m not entirely sure why, as that isn’t exactly a more logical name. In fact, I only noticed that it was Haho last week, several months after first listening to them.

Those several months ago, I liked what I heard, and did intend to feature them. Promptly, I forgot all about them, as if often the way. Then I noticed that they are one of the Awesome Pals, and projected them right back into my blog field of vision.

Copy Haho are by far the best thing to ever come out of Stonehaven in Scotland. The fact they are probably the only thing to come out of Stonehaven makes that honor a little unfair though. Hyperbole aside though, Copy Halo have obviously spent much of their youth playing Pavement records and a whole bunch of other 90s American indie to death. Words border on the laconic, melodies gently move around in the background, only occasionally leaping into action.

There is certainly a gap in the current indie scene for this kind of lazy slacker rock. Bands like 4 or 5 Magicians and My Sad Captains often come close to filling this void, but never quite seem to do so. Record labels seem to be wary of this kind of music, and I can’t for the live of me figure out why. Granted, it’s never going to sell out a stadium, but it’ll certainly get the indie kids moving. Or at least gently swaying.

No matter how many records I buy
I can’t fill this void

The mantra of the music blogger?

Let’s Wrestle are a band that have been on my radar for some time now, yet I never seemed to get the chance to write about them. In that spirit, it’s now over a year since their first proper EP, In Loving Memory Of… was released, so I’m a little behind the times. It doesn’t matter too much though as I Won’t Lie To You, as well as the record as a whole, still sounds as good now as it did then.

Let’s Wrestle is a band that seems to pride themselves on the shambolic. You get the sense with these songs that not a lot of thought went into arranging them perfectly. Whether that is the case or whether they have been designed well enough to sound that way, I don’t know. Either way, you get a sense that you are hearing the songs as they come together in the first place, not after the hundredth rehearsal.

It’s this on the fly style that carries on over to the lyrics. Wry observations are dropped in all over the place. Some make sense, others less so. The vocals come across like something you’d hear on a record by The Fall. There is a feel of Pavement here too, if not in musical style, then certainly in tone. A rough narrative is underlying it all, but one gets a sense that this is akin to indie band improv. Which is all fine with me.

In Loving Memory Of… was released last year on Stolen Recordings.

After scouring Youtube for a while and not finding anything, eventually I stumbled across this delightful little video of part of Los Campesinos! set at Reading. While the quality is kind of crappy, you get to experience the joy of the “fuck you Ting Tings” chant that Gareth accidentally started, a brief cover of Pavement’s Frontwards* before the almighty sing-along that was You! Me! Dancing!. I was located somewhere down at the front, somehow taken aback by just how boisterous it all got.

* Correction: I’m a dumbass, it’s actually Box Elder.

Stephen Malkmus will always be “that guy from Pavement”. There’s simply no getting around it. It’s something that makes appreciating his solo albums somewhat difficult. Once one manages to though, his recent work doesn’t seem quite so bad. Which isn’t to say that everything he’s done is great, but there are usually at least a couple of gems hidden on each album.

Take The Hook from his 2001 self-titled album. First of all, there aren’t enough songs about pirates. That’s something that can be proved with science. So you end with a swashbuckling adventure that is probably more about Malkmus’ time in Pavement than adventures on the high seas. As you can imagine, it’s all rather whimsical, but that’s half of it’s charm.

Ed is Dead laments superb bands that are no longer with us. It’s named in honour of the Pixies song to remind us that even though it’s sad they split up, it’s far worse when they get back together.

The unfortunate thing about writing these pieces is that I realise how many great bands have broken up, and secondly, how the majority of my favourite music now tends to date back a decade. Which is odd given I wasn’t into most of this stuff back then. Yet I can still compare bands of now and then and lament that “they don’t make them like they used to”.

It was around eight years ago that I first listened to Pavement, which means they had already been broken up for a year at the time. A couple of years of scouring over most of their releases and I can consider myself a fan. A few years in my collection to mature and they become one of the greats. Now I hope for a new band to come along that sounds like this. I don’t know some generic guitar rock band that cites Pavement as an influence either. I want a band that embraces randomness, doesn’t make a great deal of sense and has a general feeling of not giving a shit. I suspect I’ll be waiting a while.

Until then, we’ve still got three classic records and a handful of other decent releases to make do with. It’s not like this is music that ages.