Songs from your youth.

When I was a teenager during the ‘90s, Pavement sounded unbelievably fresh and charming (to me, YMMV). I had stopped listening to the radio so much and was buying more CDs (and cheap cassettes of classic albums like ‘Tapestry’, ‘Transformer’ and ‘Harvest’ from charity- or ‘op’-shops). While most bands sounded ‘tight’ in a classic way, with locked-in rhythm sections and skilful singers elevating bad lyrics just by making them sound cool, Pavement seemed to do everything the wrong way, with (again, to me) interesting results.

They were never huge commercially, but influenced a lot of local and domestic guitar bands. It’s a bit of an enduring influence too, as heard through Parquet Courts, Mac DeMarco and Speedy Ortiz (all current, and popular with younger fans and critics alike).

Rock critics often made Pavement out as exemplars of ‘90s ‘slackerdom’, or emphasised how brainy and handsome the singer, Stephen Malkmus, was (as if that mattered), or how relatively obscure their early influences were (not missing an opportunity to namecheck groups like The Fall, Swell Maps and Faust).

I was enamoured by all of this and for a good while Pavement were my “favourite band”. What I liked best was something simple yet rare within indie-rock: how they played with groove. Not in a way that defined them, but that made them easy to listen to and, despite all the verbiage and bum notes, sounded confident and relaxed.