Stephen Malkmus writes in the liner notes of the expanded 2xCD reissue of Wowee Zowee that many of his friends like this Pavement record best. In 2006, that's not a crazy notion: Wowee Zowee was Pavement's White Album, a little bit of everything thrown together, and as with the Beatles' double, its adherents prefer the band at its loosest, funniest, and most willing to do whatever pops into their heads.
But I wonder what S.M.'s friends thought when WZ was released in April 1995. Press reviews at the time were mixed, and a lot of Pavement fans were disappointed. After the faintly commercial move of Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, with its alt-rock hit single and coherent set of fully realized songs, Wowee Zowee seemed a retreat, a record that took the slacker ethos to heart and didn't bother much with songwriting. It possessed none of the key virtues of their first two full-lengths. Slanted and Enchanted, like the singles that preceded it, was unfocused but filled with mystery, a cloudy shape outlining a great band in the process of becoming. And CR, CR was clear and direct, bursting with melody, the sound of vast potential and supreme confidence fully realized. But Wowee Zowee was scattered, jokey, maybe even trivial; the band had tipped its hand and some were seeing a bluff.
But further listens and passing time improved the sound of Wowee Zowee. The original A, stretching from "We Dance" to "Serpentine Pad", may be the best album side they ever managed. And the strangely effective construction of Malkmus' songs bring to mind a question that wasn't asked the first time around: What if he wasn't screwing around, but instead was bored with where he'd been and looking for a new songwriting language? He found one, at any rate, and it all centered on his guitar. Malkmus never played better than he did here, though he didn't solo much. Instead, he let the guitar serve as the duet partner that Spiral Stairs never was, using breathtakingly melodic lines to serve as a chorus of sorts on "Black Out", "Grounded", "Pueblo", and "Flux=Rad"; all have a guitar part at their center in a place where another songwriter might have put a vocal hook.
The best songs on Wowee Zowee are slower and more meandering than what came before, and only give a passing glance to things like chorus, bridge, or meaning. As far as the latter, Malkmus was obviously picking words mostly by how they sounded, which by and large worked out great. An occasional line pops out and you're not sure if it's great or terrible-- "Pick out some Brazilian nuts for your engagement/ Check the expiration date, man, it's later than you think" from "We Dance" springs to mind, sung in a faux-Brit accent reminiscent of the Frogs-- but you wind up remembering those phrases, and the melodies in which they're wedged.
There are a few throwaways-- don't have much use for "Extradition", "Fight this Generation", and "Western Homes"-- but such goofs were part and parcel with Pavement, at least up to this point. Their final two records would contain only fleshed-out songs and are accordingly less favored by fans. Wowee Zowee was also the first and only time Spiral Stairs had a song ("Kennel District") that, though much more conventional, was every bit as good as anything Malkmus managed.
As with the reissues of their first two records, this edition of Wowee Zowee comes with non-album B-sides rounding out the first disc, and a second CD of outtakes, radio shots, live songs, and compilation tracks. With the main album including an additional half-dozen songs compared to its predecessors, the quality of the B-sides is suspect compared to previous Pavement reissues-- though "Kriss Kraft" and "Mussle Rock (Is a Horse in Transition)" (the second best song Spiral Stairs ever wrote) are easily good enough to fit on the album proper, and the entire Pacific Trim EP borders on great.
Disc 2 is a tougher slog. Some of the compilation tracks are good-- "Sensitive Euro Man" from the I Shot Andy Warhol soundtrack has an easy tunefulness, and "No More Kings" from the Schoolhouse Rock! Rocks compilation reveals Pavement as the primo interpreters of Generation X arcana, making the educational cartoon song sound like something the band wrote, thick with a playful sense of nostalgia. But I can't imagine why anyone would prefer alternative versions of songs like "Kris Kraft", "I Love Perth" (both live in BBC studios), "Heaven Is a Truck", or "Best Friend's Arm" (live in Australia). But these misses are keeping, I suppose, with the spirit of Matador's ambitious reissue project, so we have to take the bad with the good. And when you're talking Pavement in 1995 and 1996, there's no question, you're talking very, very good.
