Crooked Rain Crooked Rain: L.A.'s Desert Origins

Almost like it as much as their first outing. More polished

"Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain" was Pavement's most acclaimed album and one of the very best records of the 1990s. Disc 1 of this reissue contains the original 12-song 1994 release, B-sides from the three singles and bonus 7", plus a few songs from compilations. Disc 2 features 25 previously unreleased songs including rough Crooked Rain tracks with their original drummer Gary Young and early versions of songs from the subsequent album "Wowee Zowee". The best part of Disc 2 is the 4-song Peel Session with "Brink of the Clouds" and "The Sutcliffe Catering Song". The bonus material is slightly weaker than that from the S&E reissue, but this is still highly recommended for all Pavement fans. Hoping for a "Wowee Zowee" reissue soon.

Gets better every time I listen. This album is aging very well. All the b-sides and alternate takes remind me Very much how this band sounded on stage. Just a great record from start to finish. Recommend for anyone who came of age in the nineties.

This is a great album from one of the best bands of the 90s!

Excellent!

Crooked Rain Crooked Rain: L.A.'s Desert Origins Stephen Malkmus' REM album ages well. Like REM, the songs anchor around wondrous guitar melodies, and like Kurt Cobain, Malkmus knows a melody. His poetic musings may seem insignificant, but the quotable lines stick more than most. Lyrically, Robert Christgau compared him to poet, John Ashbery. Malkmus delivers more from a below-average voice (often sounding like he's reading directly from his notebook) than anyone else not named Lou Reed; and like Dylan, it's the cadence, the delivery from even seemingly throw away words, the ability to emphasize a syllable or draw out a phrase that can give a song signature and makes it worth a listen (see Malkmus' fantastic singing on the I'm Not There tribute for further proof: "Ballad of a Thin Man," "Maggie's Farm"). Like all great singers, it is a voice all his own. Though Crooked is not as stellar as the re-issue of the absolutely essential, "Slanted and Enchanted," it's worth this two disc "remastering." However, not without its flaws, the drums lack the talent of wacky former drummer, Gary Young (no matter how the band might otherwise protest). But where the drums may disappoint or become invisible, the guitar melodies abound. ...a half a notch higher for the amusing, insightful liner notes from SM and Spiral.

Ah, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain - a modern rock album so stuffed to the gills with effortlessly accomplished, highly melodic songwriting that it throws away its best riff in the first 90 seconds. If that act of glorious waste isn't what Pavement was about, then I don't know what qualifies. Yes, that's right: a lot of other bands would have conceptually organized an entire album around the opening chord progresson of "Silence Kit" had they been clever enough to write it. As it is, the band never returns to it after 1m30s: it's only one of THREE separate hooks in the very first song. Elsewhere, Pavement explores power-pop ("Cut My Hair," "Elevate Me Later"), prog influences ("Stop Breathin"), lo-fi jazz ("5-4=Unity"), and even country ("Range Life"). In theory, such musical polymathy threatens to put this album all over the map, with divergent genre-experiments running interference on one another and resulting in a stylistic jumble. But in fact, Pavement never sounded more together or displayed more unity of purpose than on this album. The more aggressive Slanted & Enchanted throwbacks like "Hit The Plane Down" and "Unfair" sit easily alongside cheerful burbles like "Elevate Me Later" and the friendly piano & flatpicked guitar of "Range Life." In fact, "Range Life" epitomizes the spirit of this album in many ways: it poses as a song of amiable wanderlust, but (Smashing Pumpkins digs aside) I think Malkmus inadvertantly reveals something about himself in that second verse. Sure, it's a seemingly jaundiced depiction of suburban teen life ("out on my skateboard, the night is just humming..."), but for all of Malkmus' practiced distance and inscrutability he can't help but betray real sentimentality with his loving attention to the little happy details. That gum-smacking kid weaving through dusky suburban sidewalks on his skateboard with a cheap walkman was probably him. As for this two-disc reissue, it's less magnificent on a purely musical level than Slanted & Enchanted: Luxe & Reduxe, simply because the B-sides, Peel Sessions, and outtakes aren't as compelling as those from S&E. On S&E:L&R nearly every single off-cutting from the album was essential, and the material from the Watery, Domestic EP sessions was moreso. On this reissue, however, many of the early cuts from the aborted Gary Young sessions sound like deserved outtakes, while the B-sides and stray outtakes from the sessions proper are more hit & miss. There are many real gems, though - so many, in fact, that I wonder if those who are criticizing the extras have *really* given this stuff a hard listen. Disc two's Gary Young sessions open with the greatest song that Pavement never officially released in "All My Friends," a hauntingly melodic two-part piece that fuses the best aspects of "AT&T," "Shoot The Singer," and "Unfair." (The last - and weakest - minute of the track was eventually chopped off and used as a B-side under the name "Exit Theory." This, and the fact that the song is much better produced than the next 7 cuts, leads me to believe it actually comes from the real album sessions and not the Young tapes.) Immediately following "All My Friends" is the SECOND greatest song Pavement never officially released, the spring-loaded "Soiled Little Filly." Don't let the lo-fi sound throw you off of this one, folks: the coiled tension and constant build of the song is unlike anything else in their discography. Run-throughs of "Range Life," "Stop Breathin'" and "Elevate Me Later" (here titled "Ell Ess Two" in acknowledgement of its clear musical debt to "Loretta's Scars") show how much the lyrics to these songs changed over time, while early versions of Wowee Zowee standouts "Flux=Rad," "Grounded," "Kennel District," and "Pueblo" demonstrate just how fertile a songwriting period this was. And that, really, is why the second disc of the CR,CR reissue is so welcome: it's a fantastic window into a period of Pavement's history that we previously knew little about. As for the previously released tracks, notable ones include the exquisite "Raft" (the only B-side that can compare to the classic Slanted & Enchanted-era flipsides), the gentle "Strings Of Nashville," and the remarkable R.E.M. cover of "Camera." Speaking of R.E.M., fans of both bands will get a smile out of the goofy, clever tribute "Unseen Power Of The Picket Fence," wherein the history of the band is covered up to...oh, about the second album or so. (We also learn that "TIME AFTER TIME" WAS MY LEAST FAVORITE SONG!! "TIME AFTER TIME" WAS MY LEAST FAVORITE SONG!!) Picking over the bones of the bonus tracks - and quibbling about whether or not some of them are obligatory for non-obsessives - ultimately feels small-minded. After all, you're paying the same price you normally would for a single-disc release to get a encyclopedic double-disc look at one of the great albums of the decade, complete with a well-assembled booklet containing new reminiscences and contemporaneous promotional material. Even if some of the bonus tracks aren't as improbably great as those on S&E, only a grinch would deduct a star for that. What we're left with is the simple fact that Crooked Rain is Pavement's most assured album, suffused with a warm lustrous glow that invites you into its world rather than pushing you out of it. Stephen Malkmus and Spiral Stairs' classic rock fixation has never been more boldly out in the open than on this album, and while some would argue that Crooked Rain sacrifices some of the integrity and jagged edges of Slanted & Enchanted, the exhaustingly intense "Fillmore Jive," shimmering luminescence of "Gold Soundz," or the wryly disguised memo-to-myself of "Silence Kit" are not what compromise sounds like to me.

From the standpoint of the present, we can say Pavement were simply the most important band of the '90s: if you say Nirvana or Radiohead or Beck or whatever radio-friendly unit shifters people grooved on for a couple of years, you're missing the point. Though they had a few cult precursors (people often mention The Fall, though Swell Maps are a closer match to the early incarnation of the band) Pavement so totally reinvented rock that others are still processing their stimulus today. There are three classic records, made before Stephen Malkmus and company started to try to turn a profit and quality dropped: *Slanted and Enchanted*, *Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain*, and *Wowee Zowee*; each of the three is a must-listen, but 1994's *Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain* is the most brilliant, genuine indie pop that amazed at first listen and warms today in an era of Tin Pan Alley monstrosities and "erudite" suck-ups. Pavement's music is to mainstream rock as bop is to jazz -- totally the same thing at heart, only reversed every which way to challenge the ear with revealed structure. You hear all kinds of things you secretly love mixed in, the double drums of the Dead and the California soul of the Byrds and singer-songwriters and so on. None of the lyrics make sense, but that's not an accident: demo versions of the songs available on this expanded edition typically have very different lyrics. *LA's Desert Origins* also includes nice versions of a couple of tunes later to appear on *Wowee Zowee* and some fun extras like "Unseen Power of the Picket Fence" (a wacky REM tribute that reinforces my suspicion the Pavementers may have had something of a Civil War fetish). Their only radio hit, "Cut Your Hair", captures a hopeful moment in the history of these United States that older-by-now people will be glad to be reminded of; other songs like "Gold Soundz", "Unfair" and "5-4 = Unity" remember the Stockton youth and, proleptically, the New York adulthood of Malkmus and "Spiral Stairs". They shoulda put it in a satellite --