FLYIN SHOES REVIEWS!
2000

PAVEMENT
Terror Twilight
(Matador)

 

It was just announced in the past month or so, that indie-rock stalwarts Pavement are going to be calling it quits for an "unspecified period of time". This means, of course, that they have broken up but don't all hate each other. If that were the case, they would have added the hilariously non-cryptic comment that it was "due to artistic differences".

I am majorly bummed in one way by this news, but also strangely happy. Bummed, because they have become one of the most interesting and dependable bands of any genre since their first incredible album, Slanted and Enchanted, hit the streets in the early nineties. Thus, it's sad to say goodbye. But, I'm also happy to see a quality group quit while they are ahead (if only the Rolling Stones would do the same!). Every one of their albums is great in its own way. Sure, some are spottier than others, especially given the fact that Pavement is made up of a group of highly arch and surreality-loving freaks, but overall it's been an amazing run of records.

Which brings me to their apparent last album, 1999's Terror Twilight. It was produced and mixed by Radiohead / Beck wunderkind Nigel Godrich, and I think its the overall strongest thing they have put out since their second record, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain.

Immediately apparent upon sticking Twilight in the CD player is the feast of melodic, squiggly and jagged guitars that are layered in organic swathes all over the songs. Pavement's guitar attack has been hugely influential in the "alternative" world, with direct descendants in bands like Polvo and Blur's latest incarnation, just to mention a couple, and this album is a startling reminder of why. For this reason alone, Godrich is the perfect producer, coming off two complicated and gigantically textured rock albums, Mutations and OK Computer. He handles the complexities of the arrangements with ease, allowing space and color to exist within the sometimes dense instrumentation, and making it all look easy.

The next thing that you notice is that the songs are all really good, even though the first impression of many of them is that they are more "normal" and conservative than anything else Pavement has done. This is a very misleading first impression, because what's actually happening is that they've made something that functions both as a work of catchy emotionality, like any good pop recording, and also as a pure stream-of-consciousness blast of mature art. The seeming normality and hummability of the songs acts as a doorway into quite a thick and colorful mass of images and thoughts and challenging juxtapositions that wouldn't be nearly so effective in an all-out experimental attack.

This threw some listeners off sufficiently enough when it first came out that they shelved the album, referring to it as boring or "fuddy-duddy". I remember my eyes literally bulging from my head when I read a casual one-line blow-off of it on the alt country discussion list Postcard 2. The writer of that posting, and anyone else who did not give the album its due, do not know what they are missing.

I mean, this is Pavement we're talking about here, not some dinosauric classic rock band for goodness' sake! Even at their most "conventional" and "adult", like on the song "Major Leagues", here is what the lyrics are like:

"Lip balm on watery clay

Relationships, hey, hey, hey

You kiss like a rock

But you know I need it anyway

Angle for the ringside seats

When they fall, don't blame me

Bring on the major leagues"

Swirling gorgeousness is pretty much the mode of Terror Twilight, with some more atonal and heavy moments sprinkled throughout like crazy fireworks exploding (and a couple great harmonica guest appearances by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood).

Steve Malkmus' voice has never sounded so clear and full of that weird essence that makes him so damnably listenable. Sure, he sings mostly out of key, and with a weird Lou-Reed-meets-the-Fall sort of sensibility that is not afraid to take on campy or ridiculous inflections-- but I would pretty much listen to him sing anything. Basically, he is both the heart and soul of Pavement, and I don't say that to de-value the fact that everyone else in the band is very talented and musical. It's just that the sound of his sleepy-yet-comic voice, his sloppy-yet-inspired guitar constructions, and his REM on acid lyrics ARE Pavement. I wouldn't want to hear anyone else sing:

"Epileptic surgeons with their eyes x-ed out

Attend to torn up kids

Who salivate and reckon with all the sick things that you did

The secondary stumbles

Cause the cadence of the count has led them astray

Pray their intuition leads them crashing into bodies

In a perfect way" (from "The Hexx")

yet, in his hands, it becomes as haunting and sad on a gut level as the syntax is subversive and odd. And that is the basic stance and treasure of Pavement in a nutshell: they are a band that can be as weird or weirder than the craziest musical conglomerations on the planet, and yet still grab you emotionally and reel you into the world of their songs in a human way, rather than a purely intellectual or pretentious one. We won't be seeing another band like this for a long time, I'm afraid.

The album reaches its inevitable conclusion after about 40 minutes, with the song "...And Carrot Rope", a pop megahit from some faraway planet, which acts as a five minute musical history of Pavement, embracing all of their experimental pizzazz, inspired song form, their ultimately irreverent stance (the song functions on one level as a penis joke!), and the fact that they are catchy as hell!

Just buy the damn thing, and check it out yourself. You deserve such beauty in your life!

Goodbye Pavement.

Thanks for everything!

Love,

Brian

BL

At the end of Death of a Salesman, there is the famous moment where Willy Loman's best friend gives an infuriated speech, helplessly standing over Willy's freshly dug grave. In it he says the immortal words, "Attention must be paid!" He is referring to the lost underclass, the poor blue-collar folks who have to go out every morning and eke their way through life, without hope of outside help or of ever relaxing from the grind. The people that mainstream society hardly ever brings up in its works of popular art.

Attention must be paid.

Especially in this weird world we find ourselves in now, where the "Information Revolution" is both expanding the boundaries of available everyday possibility, while also polarizing the haves and the have-nots with a gusto and speed that have not been seen since probably the early days of the Industrial Revolution.

Tom House's songs are almost all about the Willy Lomans of the world. His characters are universally unsexy, unsmooth, mired in the swamps of both emotional turmoil and the unfair machinery of the outside world, and many come across as downright hopeless. And, most unsettlingly, there is hardly ever a happy ending to any of their stories.

Tom House's first album, The Neighborhood is Changing, was one of my favorites the year it came out, and is undeniably eccentric. A combination of Appalachian folk/country melodies, sung in a reedy voice reminiscent of early Dylan (but not a copy), and supported by oddly grouped bits of percussion, fiddle, tuba, banjo and the occasional female voice. It creates the kind of self-generating space that great works of art tend to do, and its particular feel is like living in a slowly rotting neighborhood of old wooden houses in some rust belt town in late autumn, where the neighborhood crackpot is riding his battered bike down the middle of the street, banging on a garbage can lid and shouting his bizarre thoughts on life.

Tom's second album, This White Man's Burden, is cut from the same cloth as the first. It has the same ramshackle feel, and uses minimalist arrangements to great effect, but is a little less "weird" sounding (i.e., no random odd noises or strikingly arrhythmic playing). Instead, it is a bit more sad, indignant, and spooky. The one thing that remains a constant (along with the hilarious, wordless "scat" singing he adds to nearly every song-- the vocal equivalent of Dylan's harmonica!) is his penchant for showing us lives that have stalled out, or soured, and the ultimately futile gestures of the people living them.

Take the title character of "Mansberger", for instance. A bigger-than-life fellow with an odd history of boxing and circus performing who decides to settle down in the rural south just after the Civil War. He meets a woman, falls in love, and then proceeds to get married and have five children. His notoriously icy and stoic persona begins to thaw out in the face of this familial bounty, and he even starts going to church and gets baptized. The chorus puts it plainly, his new-found gratitude:

"Life was hard, somehow complete

All they'd do and share

The reflection of Almighty in Heaven

Faith it's reward and oh so sweet

God's own mystery and His glory, somehow so demanding

Won't be revealed like Job in the Bible

Beyond all understanding "

But then, a gravedigger rides his wagon past the Mansberger household one spring afternoon, carrying some corpses infected with Scarlet Fever, and being a less educated time, the kids are allowed near the remains. Soon, each of his children succumbs to the fever and dies, leaving him to carry their small bodies to the cemetery and try and still feel the grace that once filled him to brimming.

As foreshadowed in the refrain, it's a lot like the Book of Job, with one BIG difference-- upon returning home after the death of their last child, he finds his wife has succumbed and is laying on her deathbed and instead of some big moment where he embraces his humble place in the Universe and accepts the will of God, the last we see of Mansberger his wife has passed away and he is running out into the dark, stormy woods, never to be seen again.

You see, with Tom House, you are in the hands of someone who refuses to sentimentalize the pain of the world. Where another writer might tack on a moral or some kind of commentary about universal suffering, House allows you to see these people crash and burn, and thus your own sense of empathy and sadness is called to the front out of pure human-ness, and not some kind of writerly trick.

This can be disconcerting, and I don't recommend this album to everyone for that reason. If you are easily depressed, then I don't think he's your man unless you like to torture yourself!

The most painful, and most touching song on the album is the closer, "Terry Martin", about a quiet, unassuming man, who works at a bookstore, has no friends, and eats dinner at his parents' house on Sundays. And, on Saturday nights he gets drunk and walks around and pretends that he's connecting with the people he passes. The song ends with this poor sad guy sitting in a bar, finally convinced that killing himself is the best thing to do.

"Olly, Olly, Infree

How you gonna make it?

Bless my soul Lord, I don't know

Gets to be too much and I just can't take it

Close my eyes, it's a picture show."

This is industrial strength stuff here.

Not every song is about such a calamitous situation, but every single one is liberally colored by his unflinching world view and references to lightning and thunder and dark woods. There's rampant alcoholism and regret, of course ("Slipping & Drinking"); the love songs are filled with both tenderness and sorrow ("Tell Lorraine", "A Long Long Time Ago"); the semi-political songs (like "White Man's Burden") are twisted looks into the questionable workings of their narrator's mind.

This White Man's Burden is chock full of good songs, though it's not quite as musically interesting as his debut. Many of the melodies seem a tad too recycled, both from his own catalog and from obvious folk sources. The song order has the unfortunate tendency to lump pairs of similar-sounding tunes together, rather than separating them. This was my only real gripe with the first album also, the sequencing-- the effect makes the whole collection seem more samey than it really is.

But the high points more than make up for the problems, and who EVER put out a second album that rivals a brilliant first one?

If you are a fan of the John Prines and Guy Clarks of the world, and also appreciate the skewed perspectives and risk-taking of writers like Vic Chesnutt, Victoria Williams, Lyle Lovett and Randy Newman, than I think you will dig Tom House, since he is their bastard test-tube baby: a one-of-a-kind anti-folk singer, who isn't afraid to push his listeners into difficult terrain.

BL

This record was released in 1998 on what I presume is Iceberg’s own label ‘One World’. Howard Iceberg works as a immigration lawyer and his past career includes spots of car-parking, legal rights activism and teaching. He’s been playing and writing for twenty years or more and is probably a regular player in his home-town Kansas City. The standard of musicianship on this disc is extremely high and includes Mike Ireland on bass and vocals who I presume is the same Mike Ireland who has gained a certain fame in No Depression terms. So why is the shoes delving back in time to bring you this review. Put simply this is a great disc. Takes a while to sink in but Iceberg’s Kansas city accent is a joy that adds a genuine regionalism to the sound. A sound that is one part bayou swamp blues, another part Dylan and a whole lot of West Coast jug-band in its feel. Indeed I kept thinking of early Country Joe and The Fish. The lyrics are by turns emotional ‘Her Long Hair’ and ‘Play me a slow one’ and humorous as in ‘Leavin Kansas City’  well he couldn’t not write a tune with Kansas City in the title. ‘Waiting for the prisoners to riot’ has a great Chicago Juke Joint feel. Iceberg plays harmonica and a unusual half 12-string/ dulcimer instrument as well apparently. Throughout the 12 tracks ( ok 13 if you count the ‘invisible’ track) there are hints of American musical history ‘pre-irony’. There are nods to the rural blues, excello blues and the folk scene all without the kind of archness that infects a lot of contemporary releases. This music could have been made any time in the past century such its timelessness. Not all the songs are bankers but the quality of writing is good enough to guarantee two-thirds of the disc which is a lot better than most recent recordings as the treadmill of release/tour/release kicks into the creative cycle of younger ‘stars’. The honesty of this record is total. Music made because it had to be.

For sheer unadulterated fun ‘Leavin Kansas City’s steel/ fiddle interplay is hard to best –sounds like it could have slipped on a 50’s country compilation no problem. Close behind is the rockabilly shaker ‘I didn’t mean it’. Iceberg and the Titanics are at their best on these uptempo numbers….as good as Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks. I can’t praise any higher than that. The slower numbers are not bad and ‘Play me a slow one’ is painfully direct but it’s the interplay of his voice and the experienced musicianship that really pays dividends. If you like real urban American Music with shades of the rockabilly/blues heritage you should seek out this little luxury liner before it sinks outta sight again.