Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain

About

Pavement’s second album <i>Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain</i> may be the definitive 1990s indie-rock record, in large part because its lyrical wit and low-key melodic grace feel so tossed-off and casual. The band projected a defiant effortlessness that still sounds incredibly cool today, even without the context of knowing they were deliberately sidestepping the possibility of becoming “the next Nirvana” and dodging a sophomore slump after their 1992 debut, <i>Slanted & Enchanted</i>, was immediately canonized by music critic. They pulled this off mainly by making a bold stylistic pivot from twitchy post-punk and lo-fi artiness to a relaxed stoner vibe, drawing mostly from ’70s West Coast psychedelia and the more jangly end of ’80s college rock. By embracing a looseness that had been a liability in Pavement’s haphazard early live show, band leader Stephen Malkmus found his voice and delivered a handful of his most enduring songs—the wistfully romantic but oddly aloof “Gold Soundz,” the bratty bubblegum of “Cut Your Hair,” and “Range Life,” a gentle folk-rock tune that famously doubles as a Smashing Pumpkins diss track. (Billy Corgan stayed mad about that for a long time.) The deep cuts are even better: “Stop Breathin” is a melodramatic epic that conflates a tennis match with trench warfare, “Newark Wilder” is a melancholy ballad about some kind of ambiguous love triangle, and “Unfair” is a sunny punk-rock number satirizing the economic and social tensions between Northern and Southern California. (Somehow this was the <i>second</i> time the band wrote a song about this topic.) .

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

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