Pavement

Slanted & Enchanted: Luxe & Reduxe (Matador)

Pavement

Slow Century DVD (Matador)

Stumbling into “the year punk broke,” 1991, Pavement made a truly special album in Slanted & Enchanted, the demented art-pop stepchild to Nirvana’s Nevermind. A decade of underground rock had built a pillar on which a band so spastic and peculiar could succeed without ever having to “break.” If there was ever anything broken about S&E, Matador has fixed it with this ultimate 2-CD expansion, tacking on the Watery, Domestic EP, a 13-song 1992 live set, eight Peel Session tracks, and nine Slanted and Watery outtakes. The astonishing thing is that among the 30 extras, which supplement the already existing 18 classics, it’s nearly all killer, no filler. To wit: 1992’s Watery, Domestic was the greatest short EP ever made, four jewels of abstract sentimentality shooting straight for the heart every time. The three songs that emerge from the Watery sessions stand face-to-face with these four titans. The neurotic “Sue Me Jack” finally emerges as the perfect chaser to “Shoot the Singer (1 Sick Verse).” The dramatic “So Stark (You’re a Skyscraper)” is well known to Pavement zealots but appears here in its proper context at last. The 1992 Brixton Academy set captures the band at their crackling peak, with fortysomething hippie burnout Gary Young on drums. See the drummer do handstands onstage in the Slow Century DVD, featuring an hourlong documentary by Lance Bangs that illustrates what a sparkplug Young truly was. His madcap fingerprints are all over both S&E and Watery, Domestic, both recorded at his home studio in Stockton, Calif. Compared with the early footage, the two full sets from 1999 on Slow Century dramatically illustrate the spastic suburban nihilism of the early band vs. the often bored, sloppy version seen after Young’s 1993 departure. Slow Century is essential for Pavement faithful, but S&E: Luxe & Reduxe must be on the short list of anybody, anywhere. This may be the finest reissue treatment of any single album ever.

(S&E) *****

This article appears in December 13 • 2002.

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