Pavement (band)
Pavement is an American indie rock band that formed in Stockton, California in 1989. For most of their career, the group consisted of Stephen Malkmus (vocals and guitar), Scott Kannberg (guitar and vocals), Mark Ibold (bass), Steve West (drums), and Bob Nastanovich (percussion, synthesizers and vocals).
Though only briefly attracting mainstream attention with the single "Cut Your Hair" in 1994, Pavement was a successful indie rock band. Rather than signing with a major label as many of their 1980s forebears had done, they remained signed to independent labels throughout their career, including Flying Nun and Matador. They have often been described as one of the most influential bands to emerge from the American underground in the 1990s. Some prominent music critics, such as Robert Christgau and Stephen Thomas Erlewine, called them the best band of the 1990s. They have achieved a cult following.
Song lyrics
[edit]- I was dressed for success
But success, it never comes- "Here," as quoted from the album's liner notes
Quotes about Pavement
[edit]- Pavement is perhaps the defining American indie rock band of the 1990s, the group that captured the slacker zeitgeist of the alt-rock era. Standing detached from the tumult of grunge, Pavement seemed laconic, sometimes lazy, as they threaded their love of underground American rock and British post-punk, dressing their winding melodies with squalls of feedback and shambolic rhythms.
- Pavement weren’t the only early-’90s band that turned noise into something like pop [...] but the low-key charm of Slanted and Enchanted felt different. Whatever angst they might’ve felt was sublimated by a bookishness and sense of grandeur that made even their feedback seem sweet.
- With Pavement it's the sound and feel that matter, not the words or themes. Quoting lyrics to get to the heart of Pavement is misguided. Go online and print some out and you'll see that, taken on their own, they're generally meaningless. Read the track-by-track notes [Malkumus] prepared for Melody Maker at the time of the record's release and it's clear just how unknowable these songs are.
- Listening to Slanted & Enchanted is like listening to a college radio station that you can barely tune in -- melodies are interrupted by shards of white noise, only to have a simple hook pull everything back into focus. On their first full-length album, Pavement constructed a cycle of gleeful guitar noise punctuated by fragments of melody floating in and out of the chaos.
