Pavement have a fairly small catalog-- five full-length albums and a handful of EPs, plus a compilation of early singles. Over the past decade, their B-sides, radio sessions, and assorted rarities have been repackaged into a series of excellent reissues, which has made it easy to be a Pavement completist without blowing a lot of cash. It's all very accessible, but it's not easy to know where to start. Quarantine the Past, the first-ever Pavement retrospective compilation, solves this problem by providing a cheap and easy entry point to the band that represents the breadth of their songbook. The best-known songs are featured-- "Cut Your Hair", "Gold Soundz", "Here", "Shady Lane", "Spit on a Stranger"-- but so are concert staples, fan favorites, and at least a couple of curveballs. The sequence is non-chronological, zig-zagging through the catalog and evenly distributing the obvious classics throughout the running order.
It's important that a Pavement best-of not only focus on their singles, which often erred on the side of novelty and levity. The dark horses here are essential in sketching out the group's range, from the punky blast of "Unfair" and "Debris Slide" to the loose, stoned sound of "Heaven Is a Truck". "Grounded" is majestic, "Shoot the Singer" is wistful, "Date With Ikea" is a suburban anthem. "Embassy Row" is like an alternate-universe Pavement that could compete on modern rock radio with the likes of Weezer, and "Box Elder" is a platonic ideal of simple, lo-fi indie pop. Fans of the band may look over the tracklisting and wonder why some of their favorites didn't make the cut, but every song on this thing is an unimpeachable gem, and the collection presents a well-rounded summary of their distinct and varied body of work.
Pavement were mainly a vehicle for the songwriting of Stephen Malkmus, who penned almost all of the band's material. In terms of rock archetypes, Malkmus is a true original. He's erudite but bratty, laid-back yet buttoned-up. He's an inscrutable goofball, a pragmatic romantic, an aloof charmer. His music is loaded with references to cultural history-- one of these songs is an imaginary history of R.E.M.-- but his nerdy impulses and arty affect is consistently overwhelmed by his casual coolness. There's an impossible ease and haphazard grace to this music. A lot of bands work very hard to make you appreciate their meticulous craft or browbeat you with hooks, but Pavement tossed off brilliantly composed pop songs with a shambling, carefree swagger. They made it sound easy, and maybe it was. The best kind of genius tends to come very naturally to people, like a side effect of just being themselves. In "Frontwards", Malkmus sings "I've got style/ Miles and miles/ So much style that it's wasted," and that's pretty much him and his band in a nutshell.
Malkmus' lyrics, central to the band's appeal, alternate between whimsical nonsense and epigrammatic quotables. The songs seldom slot neatly into readily identifiable emotional states or refer to specific experiences, instead falling into the liminal spaces between thoughts and feelings. Malkmus' words indicate context and supply the listener with rich imagery, but the real poetry is in the way his phrases flow with the melodies, and are offset by evocative guitar textures and unexpected noises. The group never compromised tunefulness for artiness, but mystique and abstraction were among their core values. In retrospect, certain lines ring out like statements of intent-- "We need secrets," "Tricks are everything to me."
The very best Pavement songs delight in curiosity and imagination, drawing connections between images and ideas as if everything in the world was full of character and significance. This is part of why, for example, a playful joke about the voice of Rush's lead singer in "Stereo" never gets stale. It's in the middle of a song that may as well be a sub-genre unto itself, bouncing about gleefully, utterly fascinated by the all the obscure details of the world. They found the magic in the mundane, and could make small enthusiasms, silly in-jokes, and skewed observations seem profound and glorious.
A decade after the band's dissolution, Pavement's music has proven itself to have an evergreen quality. To be sure, it's all very much of its time and no band aside from perhaps Guided By Voices better epitomizes the sound and style of 1990s indie rock, but the material transcends its era as much as it defines it. This compilation exists mainly to get an entry-level Pavement product on the market to coincide with their reunion tour, but it has a value beyond crass commercial necessity. Unlike other cross-generational legacy bands like the Pixies, Sonic Youth, and Talking Heads, Pavement's songs fit together comfortably as a jukebox-friendly hit parade.
Some tracks, like the Spiral Stairs showcase "Date With Ikea" and the early EP cut "Mellow Jazz Docent", shine brighter than in their original contexts, while numbers like "In the Mouth a Desert" and "Gold Soundz" come out sounding like modern standards. As much as their albums excel as unified works, no one ever needed to hear those records in full to fall in love with "Cut Your Hair", "Shady Lane", or "Range Life" on MTV, college radio, or someone's mixtape. Quarantine the Past doesn't replace the albums, but it's a highly listenable alternative that is as much a treat for nostalgic older fans as it is a valuable gateway for new listeners.
