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4. “Frontwards”
Having “so much style that it’s wasted” is a pretty good brag. This cut from the 1992 “Watery, Domestic” EP — four top-tier Pavement songs, no skips — is punctuated by stinging lead guitar and provides the documentary with its opening disclaimer: “The stories you hear, you know they never add up.”
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5. “Silence Kid”
Or is it “Silence Kit”? Depends which part of the album art you look at; Pavement never liked to be pinned down. From the opening notes of this track, it became clear that the “Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain” LP was on a different wavelength from “Slanted,” putting a lot more classic rock into the mix. The vocal melody seems partially cribbed from “Everyday” by Buddy Holly — a far cry from the Fall.
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6. “Cut Your Hair”
Pavement had one of its biggest alt-rock hits with “Cut Your Hair,” full of crunchy guitars and catchy “ooh, ooh, oohs.” It’s very Malkmus to write a song that could actually get played on MTV and end it by singing “career” over and over until the syllables are drained of meaning.
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7. “Gold Soundz”
Pavement sometimes went in a more jangle-pop direction — clean guitars, shiny melodies. (They love R.E.M.) “Gold Soundz” is jangle-Pavement at its best, with some of Malkmus’s least cryptic sentiments: “So drunk in the August sun and you’re the kind of girl I like.”
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8. “Grounded”
“Wowee Zowee,” from 1995, might be the group’s most divisive LP. To its champions, the 18-track, three-sided record (the fourth was left blank) is an indie-rock “White Album,” while its detractors find it wildly uneven. The high points, though, are undeniably high, like “Grounded,” with its chiming intro and a chorus that can give chills.
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9. “AT&T”
The two singles from “Wowee,” “Rattled by the Rush” and “Father to a Sister of Thought,” were both slower songs that didn’t really catch on, although Malkmus says in “Pavements” that he wasn’t being intentionally perverse and believed they were hits. (“I think I was smoking a lot of grass at the time,” he explains.) Maybe they should have gone with this bouncier number, with absurd lyrics (“My heart is made of gravy”) that include what I’m assuming is rock’s only shout-out to the Javits Center.
