Pavement
I Have Been to Heaven and Back: Hen’s Teeth and Other Lost Fragments of Unpopular Culture Vol. 1
This has already been a great year for guitar thinkers–Sleater-Kinney’s The Hot Rock, the Latin Playboys’ Dose, and Built to Spill’s Keep It Like a Secret all mix smarts and riffs in revolutionary ways. Sleater-Kinney are hedgehogs: they’ve got a story (girl can’t stop the noise in her head, girl meets guitar, girl rocks) and they’re sticking to it. The Playboys are a foxy side project in which two members of Los Lobos and two record producers work out their coolest ideas. Doug Martsch of Built to Spill used to be a fox, changing lineups and styles with every record, but now he’s found a band he can hole up with. And more recently Pavement and the Mekons–two of the brainiest guitar bands around–have released new albums that reveal more clearly than ever what kind of animals they are.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The Pavement boys have been dubbed foxes for their preppy good looks, but Steve Malkmus, the band’s principal songwriter and vocalist, is an unmitigated hedgehog–and on the new Terror Twilight, for the first time he’s the band’s only singer and songwriter. His MO looks foxy on paper because it freely appropriates from many others: punk’s rhyming guitars, classic rock’s crunchy melodies and theatrical tempo changes, country’s twang and swing, singer-songwriter pacing. He’s a hedgehog, though, because he combines these elements in such a distinctive way. Plus, his words are instantly recognizable; no other rock singer is so literary, so funny, so inscrutable. A single tune from Terror Twilight, “Platform Blues,” for example, includes sports metaphors (“Follow through to the end / And we’ll rip the heart out from the defense”), absurd slogans (“Mandrake versus the snake / I got it on the camera for posterity”), and a quick musical quote from the Velvets’ “The Murder Mystery.”
There’s nothing as infectious as “Stereo” or “Cut Your Hair” or “Box Elder” here. The first single, “Spit on a Stranger,” nicely captures the stuttering meter and bonhomie of Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Mr. Bojangles,” but it won’t cling to the inside of your scalp the way “In the Mouth a Desert” does. The twinkly “Major Leagues” gently reprises “Range Life,” and “You Are a Light” recalls the variations of Brighten’s “Shady Lane.” Malkmus lets his vocals carry lovely nonsongs like “Ann Don’t Cry” and “Billie,” and only “Speak, See, Remember” has enough energy to get up off the couch, effortlessly building from a mumble to a sweeping climax. The absence of Kannberg’s publishing doesn’t help. Spiral’s chirpy new-wave ditties on Brighten the Corners provided sweet relief from Malkmus’s winsome pomposity, recalling the energy of the band’s first singles. But the raw energy of the band’s earlier days has no place in Malkmus’s vision now.
If Langford and Timms are the Mekons’ body, the band’s soul is the skeletal Tom Greenhalgh, who founded the group with Langford in art school. I’ve Been to Heaven and Back belongs to him from the first and title cut, a new version of a great song that was (say the liner notes) “pointlessly excluded” from the U.S. release of The Mekons Rock ‘n’ Roll (1989). Singing his guts out, Greenhalgh tells the defiant tale of the last survivor of a pogrom. A few tracks later, he claims Rod Stewart’s chestnut “You Wear It Well,” which suddenly seems obvious–what other lonely lover would recall his inamorata’s “homesick blues and…radical views”? “Roger Troutman” is not a eulogy for Zapp but a bleepy-bloopy page from the chaotic The Mekons Story, a 1982 collection that looked back on what was already a catholic career; it contrasts nicely with the 1991 disco soccer anthem “Circle City (Mekons vs. Peace Love Hooligans).” “Cowboy Boots” is an exemplary moment from the band’s beloved Sin Records period of the 1980s; Greenhalgh plays the weary drifter, watching his reflection in the shiny tops of rain-soaked shoes. And in “Axcerpt,” from the 1996 Lounge Ax benefit CD, he sums up the Mekons’ philosophy while describing a drunken evening: “He was thinking all different things / Pain & pleasure, good and evil…All sorts of things can happen here / Possibilities exploding, you can change things / You can do what you want.”
