For a lot of bands, the ten year mark is the time when they start to look around and question what they're doing. There's a palpable sense of momentum running out. Maybe the muse stops coming as often as she did. Maybe they just get tired of being around the same people all the time. Whatever the case is, the band members are ten years older, too, and those kind of milestones make you question everything around you. I'm about two months away from turning 25--a quarter century old, yeesh--and I was just talking to a longtime friend last night about the past. Through a haze of scotch and nostalgia, I remember telling her that I live my life in the present and the past; the future is a terrifying unknown to me.
These are all the kind of things I think about when I listen to Brighten The Corners. In my review of the non-deluxe edition of the album I said that "[i]t's Pavement's most mature album in many ways, from the mostly mannered songs and arrangements to the lyrical subjects that frequently mention marriage, growing old, and changes in general." Writing about the album those months ago I was looking forward to the forthcoming reissue to give me some more context for it, to maybe help me appreciate it better. Well, my feeling about the original Brighten The Corners remains the same. It's Pavement's weakest album and their least interesting. But the extra material included here is worth discussing for two reasons:
1) It is much more rambunctious and messy than the album
2) It represents the beginning of the end of Pavement
If you pre-ordered the so-called Nicene Creed Edition of Brighten The Corners, it came with an unreleased live album on vinyl. Since it was such a limited release and doesn't come with every copy I won't get into it too greatly. I wish it had been included with every copy of the album, though, since it's so good. Despite the scattered live songs on the other deluxe reissues and the shows on the Slow Century DVD, we've never been given a good snapshot of live Pavement pre-'99. Wherever this show was recorded in Europe in '97, the versions of the songs played on it are loose and fun, again hinting that sometimes Pavement's loose and sloppy approach to shows could produce brilliance. As for the extras included on the 2 CD set, well, they're spotty at best.
The most confusing aspect of this reissue to me, initially, was that a good deal of the b-sides and outtakes included here date from the Terror Twilight era. What I've since realized is that--and this gets into the second point I wanted to make--the band were already beginning to dissolve at this point. The two best extras on the first CD--'And Then (The Hexx)' and 'Harness Your Hopes'--come from b-sides from the single for 'Spit On A Stranger', which is from the Terror Twilight album. Was the band so starved for material that they dug back into the Corners sessions?? It seems so. This is made clearer by the general poorness of the other outtakes and b-sides. 'Westie Can Drum' and 'Roll With The Wind' are fun but rough, reminding one of the Wowee Zowee era.
The second CD flies off the rails entirely, showing Pavement at their best and worst. 'Slowly Typed' is an interesting, country romp version of 'Type Slowly' while 'Cherry Area' is a frustrating, stuttering, and apathetic electro-grind alternate version of 'Embassy Row.' Meanwhile, the four covers range in quality from good to pointless ('The Killing Moon' is good, 'Oddity' is decent synth-pop, 'It's A Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl' and 'The Classical' are only worth a single listen). Of the remainder, only the "psych" into to 'Embassy Row', a jammy live take on 'Type Slowly', and the playful 'Grave Architecture' are revelatory. One assumes they were serious about the 'clearing the vaults' idea by including the two versions of the band's attempt to "play" the Space Ghost "theme", because only hardcore fans like your's truly would be patient enough to sit through five minutes of Pavement flailing around and making noise.
I can't help coming away from this deluxe edition feeling disappointed. But I think most of that has to do with my expectations and not the product. I wanted something more, I guess, than the usual lot of b-sides, outtakes, and live material. For what it's worth, the essay included in the booklet is unnecessary and useless, especially compared to the other reissues, which had decent essays and/or notes from the band members. And I guess that lies at the heart of why I find this whole package a let down. Brighten The Corners has always struck me as not particularly interesting and the bonus material included here is a mess, not up to the general quality of previous reissues. Really the best thing about it is the live album but you had to pre-order it and have a way of playing a vinyl record to enjoy it. But I digress...
The Nicene Creed edition of Brighten The Corners is currently available for only two dollars more than the standard edition on Amazon.com. Even the most casual Pavement fan will find the extra disc-and-a-half of bonus material worth that kind of money. Yet I still have reservations about the album itself. You can read my in-depth take on it elsewhere, but suffice it to say that a three star album with a mixed bag of extra material only gets bumped up to four at best. This is really more of quantity over quality thing, but if you're a fan of the band it's worth it. And I can't wait to see what they do for the inevitably reissue of Terror Twilight in a year or two...
Dear Stephen Malkmus:
As I write this letter, I am eagerly anticipating the arrival of a package containing the expanded reissue of your former band Pavement's album Brighten The Corners. It comes with an unreleased live album (on vinyl, no less!!) that was supposed to have been released between Corners and Terror Twilight. In some strange way I think I'm looking forward to this reissue more than the other ones because, honestly, Brighten The Corners has always been my least favorite Pavement album and '96 to '98 are the era I know the least about. This had me thinking, too, about your other band, the Jicks, and the "solo" albums you've done since Pavement with them. And I realized that your first, self-titled "solo" album is my least favorite of the bunch so far but that I also am the least familiar with it.
So I decided to give it another listen and take some notes, to give some form to my feelings about the album and why I can only remember a handful of songs from it. I'm sending you this letter because I think I need to karmically balance my endless stream of love letters with some criticism.
Stephen Malkmus is a strange album. Actually, what I meant to say is, it's a confused album. You originally called it 'Swedish Reggae.' And it was supposed to be billed as simply 'The Jicks' with your name nowhere on the package. Finally, it was a self-titled "solo" release even though people stress that it's not really "solo." Except that the line-up of the Jicks keeps changing from album to album and...Yeah, see what I mean?? I really wish you had kept the original title, it was great. The use or not of the new band name doesn't matter much to me but did you really need to have a picture of yourself on the cover?? It's lazy and expected that an artist's first solo album would be both self-titled and have a picture of them on the cover. At least you didn't go the Peter Gabriel route and self-title your first four solo albums...
Trying to give concrete details of the misgivings I have for this album is tough. It's just a general sense of malaise, as if you threw everything at a wall and saw what stuck. Stephen Malkmus has some fantastic songs--'Church On White' is a brilliant psychedelic ballad, 'The Hook' is cowbell driven fun, and 'Vague Space' is a relaxed late album gem with a great chorus--but the rest stream by without much impact. 'Troubbble' is a ill-advised return to the short Pavement pieces like 'Serpentine Pad'; 'Pink India' flails around for almost six minutes in search of a direction; 'Trojan Curfew' sounds like a bad Built To Spill b-side; the best part about the overblown MOR rocker 'Discretion Grove' is the cool drum loop that opens it...The album has the feel of an artist pulled in two directions at once, toward more mannered classicist rock/pop via ballads and guitar solos but also toward the usual slew of surreal lyrics and unexpected surprises. I rarely break down an album song by song, but my lasting impression of Stephen Malkmus is that it's half great and half sub-par. It's a transitional album through and through, Mr. Malkmus (can I call you Stephen??), and while they make for interesting listens they usually aren't especially good.
I don't mean to sound overly harsh, but we're most critical of those we love. I like your first "solo" album but I don't love it. You definitely developed the nascent ideas of this release with your next three solo releases, which are all excellent. Here's hoping my package gets here today. I hope you and your family are doing well and that you have a lovely holiday season.
Your fan,
Greg Lytle
p.s. Any chance of a reissue for that Crust Brothers album?? For the title alone, Marquee Mark should never go out of print.
From the "you can't make this stuff up" file: the package came as I was editing this review. Weird.
The final albums by bands often have a fascinating quality about them that has nothing to do with the music contained inside. It's tempting to throw the lyrics across a table like owl bones and try to read coded messages about a break-up or inter-band acrimony. At the same time, it's also tempting to compare the final album to the subsequent solo material and/or side projects of the former band members. Would the band have naturally headed in those directions, or did it take the end of the band and a "clean slate" mindset to create those changes??
Terror Twilight has a reputation that has nothing to do with the music. Fans see in the lyrics from 'Ann Don't Cry' Stephen Malkmus's farewell to the band--"I am not having fun anymore"--while a literal farewell was in the alternate title for the album (according to The Slow Century DVD, a working title was Farewell Horizontal). However, I've never bought the assertion I see sometimes that this is a proto-Malkmus solo album. Though all the songs are written by Malkmus, there is still that distinct Pavement-ness to the album; in fact, despite the production of Nigel Godrich, it's actually more unhinged and off-the-cuff than Brighten The Corners.
Coming at the end of the 90s and the end of the band's lifetime, Terror Twilight is their secret masterpiece. I would wager that as time has gone on, and continues to go on, more and more people will come around to it. As it's the band's last album, it's had too much stigma attached to it for people to peel back those surface layers and get to the meat beneath. That is to say, it's the band's most overtly psychedelic and 60s inspired album. For the video for 'Shady Lane', Malkmus's vision for director Spike Jonze was to create something that was "psychedelic but not retro." That vision, it seems to me, was carried over to the Terror Twilight album.
In many ways, too, Terror Twilight is like a mini-Wowee Zowee in terms of its variety. The MOR pop ballad 'Major Leagues'--which I initially hated and have only recently come around to, thanks to its sublime "they'll wear you down sometime" bit--butts up against the dense, three-part, bluesy (no pun intended) 'Platform Blues', with harmonica soloing from Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood. Elsewhere, the cool, groovy 'Speak, See, Remember' (the one song that even people who don't seem to like Terror Twilight will admit is awesome) gives way to the the intense guitar meltdown 'The Hexx' (the first of many Malkmus long jams that either end or help bring an album to a close), which then gives way to the impossibly catchy 'Carrot Rope', complete with overlapping sing-along vocals.
Pavement's album covers, lyrics, and music have always been odd and sitting outside the mainstream, but Terror Twilight pushes the whole thing into 'psychedelic.' For instance, 'Spit On A Stranger' is about kissing another person for the first time, though you would really have to think about it to understand that. With these skewed lyrical nuggets comes a more overtly psychedelic/60s inspired sound. Though some of this credit must be given to producer Nigel Godrich, who had Radiohead's OK Computer from 1997 and Beck's Mutations from 1998 under his belt (two albums that have similar psychedelic/60s leanings), Malkmus must take the main brunt of the credit/blame for this album. Guitar effects pedals and mostly-subtle squiggling and burbling keyboards are used prominently alongside clean guitars with slight reverb. At the same time, some of the songs are Malkmus's most ambitious, like the aforementioned 'Platform Blues' and 'Speak, See, Remember.' Watching the band play these songs live in The Slow Century DVD, you get the feeling that Malkmus broke up the band partially because they simply weren't tight and practiced enough to do these justice. It simply wasn't in Pavement to have that much discipline; in the same DVD, bassist Mark Ibold points out that he sings on 'Carrot Rope' but they don't play it live because he couldn't teach himself to play bass and sing at the same time.
I will concede that Terror Twilight isn't their best album. That title rightfully belongs to one of their first three depending on your taste. However, Terror Twilight also isn't as mediocre as people have been saying since its release. While Brighten The Corners needs a reissue to help flesh out its era and give it some context, Terror Twilight is the album that people need to return to without the baggage of context. If you merely listen to it and let it reveal itself for what it is, you'll find a lot to like here.
Of all the Pavement albums most in need of reevaluation and re-contextualizing via the deluxe reissue treatments Matador has been giving Pavement for the past half decade, Brighten The Corners is at the top of my list, followed by Terror Twilight. While I have a clear picture of what Terror Twilight is and what the band were trying to achieve, I also know that there were a myriad of b-sides and Spiral Stairs songs left off that will provide for rich grist when the time comes for its 2 CD rebirth.
What I can't quite grasp is much about Brighten The Corners. Its era (1996 through early 1998) is easily the most undiscussed and unknown period in Pavement's history; things seem to kind of stop at the end of the Wowee Zowee era with the release in January 1996 of the Pacific Trim EP and pick up again in the summer of 1998, with the recording sessions for Terror Twilight, which is also a time when Stephen Malkmus began to do solo shows and was quickly, then slowly, then quickly on his way to breaking up the band toward the end of 1999. Watching The Slow Century DVD you would hardly know Brighten The Corners is released, other than the five or so minutes it's given where Stephen Malkmus mentions that with the album they were trying to show more of their classic rock and REM influences.
Yet even with that Rosetta Stone the album itself is a bit of a slippery thing to nail down. It's Pavement's most mature album in many ways, from the mostly mannered songs and arrangements to the lyrical subjects that frequently mention marriage, growing old, and changes in general. It also is their most accessible by virtue of the fact that there are no noise bursts or screaming; even their other "my parents might like this" album, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, had stuff like 'Hit The Plane Down.' So, then, Brighten The Corners is their classic rock/REM album...but it's Pavement's take on this aesthetic, so it's odd and still too strange for the mainstream audience it should have/was trying to appeal to.
We need to keep in mind that, during 1996 and 1997, people were again predicting the death of rock and roll. Electronica/techno had finally caught on in America--after years of being huge in Europe and other locales--and as usual for a short sighted and culturally narrow minded populace, some American critics and writers began to wonder if it would replace rock. Never mind that "with us or against us" and black-and-white have no place in music and never have; also never mind that jazz, blues, rock, hip hop, country, folk, techno, etc. can co-exist peacefully and cross pollinate and create great things. No, it seems that everyone was again making the mistake and saying rock was dead. Into this mire came Pavement, with their most thoroughly old fashioned album. In the aforementioned DVD, a European journalist asks Malkmus if, with Brighten The Corners, they are trying to save rock. He mutters some clever answer about how they feel alone on an island with a few other bands, but they'll save it in the end. I don't think he meant it, but it's a telling comment/joke nonetheless.
It's impossible for me to listen to this album without the above paragraph of context. Brighten The Corners is a sharp departure from the excess and variety of Wowee Zowee, and while I don't think it was an attempt to become a huge popular band that would save rock, it must at least have been an attempt to do something wholly different from their last. For that very reason, it's my least favorite Pavement album, and in many ways, I think it's their least interesting both to listen to and talk about. You may have noticed how much time I've given to everything about the album other than the music, and that's done half intentionally and half not so. I simply don't feel like I have much to say about the album; after a listen or two, its strengths and weaknesses feel self evident.
There are three things I want to point out, and they each involve two song pairs. The first is that 'Stereo' and 'Shady Lane' are among the best Pavement songs ever, and that they begin the album and were the sole singles from it is significant. Secondly, this album is the showcase for Spiral Stairs. Though he only contributes two songs, they are probably his best--with all due respect to 'Kennel District.' 'Date With Ikea' is a great, classicist rock/pop song with Kannberg's unpretentious vocals to make it deeply hummable, while 'Passat Dream' is one of the most unique pieces of the Pavement discography, with a danceable drum beat and a psychedelic backdrop of guitars, keyboards, and "ooh-woo-woo-ooh-ohh" vocals. Lastly, the album closes with the one-two punch of 'Starlings of the Slipstream' and 'Fin', two songs that both have that distinctive "this is the song that closes the album" feel to them. They always throw me off because I don't expect 'Fin' until it starts because 'Starlings' has such finality to it.
Actually, I lied, I have one last thing to say about the album. I'll try to make this quick because I don't have any evidence to back this up. Rather, this is just a matter of feeling: Brighten The Corners doesn't feel like a Pavement album to me. I say "feel" but I also mean "sound." I'm trying my best not to be vague, but there is simply something a bit off about the whole thing. Something in the production, the way the songs sound, how the instruments work with the lyrics, the general vibe of the whole thing...People like to give Terror Twilight guff for being a proto-Malkmus solo album, but if it is, at least it sounds like the other Pavement albums. Listen to Brighten The Corners before or after their other ones. All Pavement albums have a unique vibe and sound, but--again, apologies for being vague--there is something off about Brighten The Corners.
Though Brighten The Corners is my least favorite Pavement album, it also proves how good least-favorite-albums-by-one-of-my-favorite-bands can be. It's the sort of thing like Bossanova by the Pixies where I always forget how much I enjoy it until I make myself listen to it again. I look forward to the deluxe reissue of Brighten The Corners in order to help me get a better understanding and possible appreciation of this (kind of) undiscovered era of Pavement. Until then, know that Brighten The Corners is worth a listen for fans, but only after you've heard everything else. While it may seem I am being a bit harsh on something I admittedly like, I listen to it the least of any Pavement/Malkmus albums, and that should say more than all the words I just rambled out.
For a lot of bands, the ten year mark is the time when they start to look around and question what they're doing. There's a palpable sense of momentum running out. Maybe the muse stops coming as often as she did. Maybe they just get tired of being around the same people all the time. Whatever the case is, the band members are ten years older, too, and those kind of milestones make you question everything around you. I'm about two months away from turning 25--a quarter century old, yeesh--and I was just talking to a longtime friend last night about the past. Through a haze of scotch and nostalgia, I remember telling her that I live my life in the present and the past; the future is a terrifying unknown to me.
