"I'm drowning for your thirst/Drowning for your thirst": The official WOWEE ZOWEE REISSUE anticipation thread

u mad

no way - the "lack" of editing is precisely why it's their best album!

from the matador discography:

OLE-722 2 dbl CD Pavement -- Wowee Zowee DELUXE Fall 2006

Next question: when did the WOWEE ZOWEE critical revisionism take place?

*raises hand*

Although if you consider CRCR flawed because of "Hit the plane down", how can you excuse "Best Friend's Arm"? I guess I found it mildly amusing when I was 20 or so but it must be one of Malkmus's worst Pavement songs...

I guess I thought WZ was the best Pavement album when it came out and now barely listen to it.

What constitutes a restaurant kitchen fave?

WZ didn't come close! There was the novelty aspect, and it felt thrown together. It totally lacked the cohesiveness that made S&E and CRCR stand out

That's incredibly likely. I bought all of their albums, but only out of some form of respect. Nothing after CRCR did much for me.

I've grown to nod to the songs on WZ that I used to always skip over... I wished they replaced those songs with the singles B-sides instead still, that's all.

Terror Twilight is still my favorite Pavement album... despite it being "the first Steve Malkmus solo record" not unlike the analogy to Trompe Le Monde.. (in that I didn't care for the actual solo records that followed at all.)...

Brighten The Corners, aside from "Stereo", still evades my attention.

I preferred them when they were borrowing more from british post-punk/Sonic Youth (Westing & S&E), and was more than happy to join them in the classic rockisms that crept into their sound on CRCR.

After that, they lost (or so it seems to me) the more obscure, jagged elements and became more of an indie pop band. More jangle, more structure to the songs.

I'm pretty sure Eric Weisbard awarded it a "6"; it was the first serious blow to Pavement's popularity, and as such I didn't buy it unitl 1998 despite loving "Rattled by the Rush" (still my favorite Pavement song).

Despite their disavowals of "progress," this proceeds as you'd figure--toward lyricism rather than commerciality or some such chimera. It's seldom hard or fast or chaotic, and if it was their sacred mission to humanize guitar noise, they've betrayed it like the reprobates they no doubt are. But if their vocation is beguiling song-music that doesn't sound like anything else or create its own rut, this reinforces one's gut feeling that they can do it forever. They can't, of course--nobody can. But the illusion of eternity has been music's sacred mission for a good long time Grade: A

Except weren't they already kind of in a rut?

Perhaps someone else also remembers this and could link to that topic.

xpost yeah Steve googling is surely an infallible research method and is totally representative of the zeitgeist/buzz!

But yes thank you for your insight, suggestions and multiple replies.

also

1. Terror Twilight
2. Most other music

lolzz

i had forgotten about "easily fooled," that song is SUPERB! it's very grifters. isn't that also the single that has the total jon spencer pisstake?? "i ain't no woman... i aint no woman.. i'm a.. MAYUNNN!! check me out!!"

And I think Wowee Zowee was the album that had Pavement at their most Pavementy, with regard to that quality. Yes, it was full of wise-ass slack moves and all that, but it also contains a pretty high proportion of the band's prettiest songs -- stuff like "We Dance" and "Grave Architecture," or the verses of ... is it "AT+T?" Everyone's completely OTM upthread about how all this stuff "blurs together," and I think that's really important to the pretty stuff. None of those songs seem to be popping up and announcing it: "Hi, this is the pretty song, please note the pretty guitar tone, etc." No, they just get to stumble into it naturally, like they're finding that beauty right in front of you. (Part of why everything "blurs," after all, is that the songs are all recorded the same way, with the same guitar tones, and not too many track-to-track production shifts; it feels like they're just playing and coming across each thing individually.)

So that quality, that "casually stumbling across pretty things" quality, felt important then, especially when held up against alt-rock. Thing is, I feel like this reissue might still retain that feeling, even in a whole other context, because ... well, compare to all the run-of-mill indie bands right now who have that same quality of wanting to tell you that their stuff is beautiful, or hard, or whatever; compare to the amount of stuff these days that feels like its effect is very carefully calculated. On Wowee Zowee, Pavement actually sound like they're as open-minded about their record as the listener is expected to be -- they play what they play like it's no big deal, and they show a really surprising amount of range and skill in being able to stumble over and steer their way into a lot of really complex, wonderful things. I would love to hear more albums these days that caught that spirit, even if it did mean rocky, uneven records -- sorting through this kind of rocky unevenness is fairly pleasurable, and I'm probably fonder of "Best Friend's Arm" than any number of really solid well-written tracks.

nabisco, that's perfect. Thanks!

I love everything up to CRCR, but Watery, Domestic is my favorite Pavement stuff ever, except maybe the repackaged S&E that includes it

Though I convinced myself that I liked it at the time, Slanted and Enchanted reduced the whole shebang to just another indie rock band with some album out. I never bothered paying attention to them afterwards.

And then there's a lot of stuff in their decisions of what to play. Look at the beginning of CRCR, where, after a bit of deliberate intro slop, they break into playing big swinging riff -- except kind of twisting up the accepted organization fo the time, where playing riffs like that was supposed to be the province of tight "we know what we're doing" rock, and indie/alt bands were supposed to be sticking to power chords and simpler punk riffs. (Part of their "sloppy" tag might have just been contextual, the way they were one of few bands in their genre who broke outside punk's rigid rhythmic grid in that way.) Their choices of what to play gave an impression of "sloppiness" even when they were executing well, which is one of the things about Wowee Zowee -- with stuff like "Best Friend's Arm," it's not that the playing is bad, it's that the song itself seems to have been written to sound wreckless and falling-apart. (I can't imagine any band on Earth playing a faithful rendition of "Best Friend's Arm" where the first part didn't sound sloppy! Or at least not without sounding like morons.)

So it's in the writing, too, the way guitar lines would swing around and stop on notes that sounded like mistakes (haha "off-kilter"), or drop to places that were exactly a half-step short of where the key would supposedly dictate. There's plenty of stuff about the production and rhythmic feel that's important here, too. But yeah, it definitely wasn't a matter of their stuff being sloppy by accident, sloppy by incompetence, or even sloppy by nature -- there was surely an intention to be slack and casual in certain ways.

If "Brinx Job" didn't sound "sloppy" it would sound like the 1920s, I think.

(a) In today's context it actually sounds a lot slicker and less haphazard than it felt when it came out. I was a little surprised by that, but I suppose production from that era did tend to be pretty plush and shiny.

(b) Cf that "blurring together," there's a level on which the album works almost like a movie -- which is to say that instead of thinking "I like this song," it seems easier to think "I like that part where X happens." Some of my favorite things on here are random events, like at the beginning of "Grave Architecture," when Malkmus says "come on in," or his ridiculous "I don't know / if I should" delivery on "Your Serpentine Pad." This would explain some of the happy lyric-quoting upthread -- like quoting from a popular comedy.

(c) I hadn't thought about the song organization. Most of the tracks start relatively "pretty" and organized, through the first verse -- and then, instead of switching through a bunch of formal arranged changes, they just kind of loosen up and work off the chord structure, jamming and riffing, with Malkmus getting squealier and ramblier.

(d) Which reminds me of one thing that people used to talk abotu with Pavement a lot, and which seems to have disappeared from the way they're talked about in retrospect -- there are so many classic-rock moves, only executed in this slack 15%-ironic way. Vocals and guitars both, on CRCR and WZ: there are all these guitar-in-the-crotch face-making aww-yeah rock things, only played in a way that comes off as ... something else.

absolutely! i don't know why but that particular moment has always really affected me.

-- morris pavilion (yndlqls0...), July 6th, 2006"

THE record for lazy summer nights and a case of beer.

-- rentboy

I saw Pavement twice, once (CRCR/WZ time at a guess) they put on a pretty good indie-rock showzzzzz... so BORED I went home early.

The second time was just before they split in a home-size venue, they played all the singles, revisited the S&E grating sideways guitar mess stuff for a laugh, it was fucking great.

Wowee Zowee? It killed my enthusiasm for them stone dead. There were some good songs on it but the whole piece felt calculated, tired and just weak. Weak execution, weak lyrics, weak melodies and a drop in imagination. I guess it was "mellow" but it was also desperately dry.

They'd never come across like that before to me. At heart it just lacked *life* somehow. They sort of managed some facsimile of fun & spunk for the next one but even that I'm having tremendous difficulty recalling (should maybe sell it before the reissues arrive...)

The ILM fanwank frankly does little to convince me to try again, especially in 2006. I suppose my ears have got more jaded/ or I've become less tolerant/more narrow minded but you all could be talking about Destroyer's Rubies or some shit and it'd be hard to tell the difference really.

black out=lovely song.

at&t=ditto.

Drop in imagination? Dude, it's their most imaginative, ambitious album.

Why are you even bothering to post about it? Jeez.

Buy some beers, drink three and a half of them (or however many it takes you to get giggly) and put this on and listen to it w/out thinking about this sort of thing: "Are they trying to be calculated? Are they overthinking it?" and LISTEN to the music (without overthinking about it) and then make your decision. Sorry to be going off but this is probably a top 5 album for me.

Why am I bothering to post? I guess to see if anyone else felt the same way, sharing my own experience seeing as the thread was discussing the reception this got at the time ("I was there" etc) any number of reasons! I'll try and remedy my non-ownership at some point.

Thinking back this may actually be THE album that finally killed any love of "indie" guitar rock though... Pavement also being the last band you could reasonably bracket as such that I remotely genuinely CARED about.

Not that there's anything wrong with this...

That's the feeling I got from Pavement, anyway.

Maybe by the time WZ came along the meta-ness was just too obvious to ignore, so they just took it further. They could hardly play it straight for even one song, creating an album of fucked-up-disjointed-fun-beauty-whimsy.

This is the album that reaffirmed my love for music, so I'm surprised people have had the opposite experience.

This is my favorite Pavement album. So I don't quite know what you mean by "opposite experience."

I didn't think it was possible for music to reference itself, so I assumed you meant the lyrics.

Please explain how music (or an approach to it) can be "meta"

Pending reinvestigation just assume it was too subtle for me and move on. It's a cop-out but as I'm also not armed with the evidence here to make my case for/against properly it would be bullheaded to continue. It might be good when I go back but it sure as hell felt sub-par back then.

Except that he talks about sloppiness vs. prettiness and not really meta. I like what he says, and I agree with it. I like it when music makes sloppy ass noise for awhile (see first half of Best Friends Arm) and then turns into a semi-regular sounding song.

But that still doesn't explain metaness at all, brother. How can music be meta?

fandango--

I'm not trying to get into a huge swooping argument. I just don't understand what meta means in the context of this record (and fandango you used it as well!)

I just don't think you gave it a chance. It's a great record.

Also, why if a beloved (for many people) "indie rock" band gets discussed on any thread here, people automatically use the word "fanwank" (or something masterbatory to that effect) to describe people's interactions with it? Yet nobody uses masterbation imagery to describe the numerous (middle-aged?) men here fawning over pop music made by "cute" barely legal teenage British girls (just to name one example from a parallel and current thread).

I'm just curious about the masterbation imagery referring to that old straw man that is the indie rock. Is it that the indie rock ideal is that it's music made by "people like me" for "people like me." So if you obsess about it, it must be masterbatory by default. If that's the case, I say okay, it's, you know, sex with someone I love. But to me it's more of a circle jerk for a thread to go on about how cute Lily Allen is than to say how rad False Skorpion is. Hell, nobody here was saying how sexy Malkmus was circa Wowee Zowee (and we all know he's a foxy guy).

GGGGGGGENERATION

CAPTIVATE THE SENSES LIKE A GINGER-ALE RAIN

Uh, er, yeah.

Nabisco’s posts above eloquently put into words what I’ve always adored about this record, but the lack of enchantment some others feel about WZ in the pantheon of Pavement makes me wonder if the fact that WZ was the first full-length Pave I’d encountered – before that I’d only purchased/absorbed the Gold Soundz CD/EP – is a part of what makes it so special and ultimately more satisfying than anything else they did.

BBC Sessions 1995-1997

http://www.acidcasualties.com/sai2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=47&Itemid=54

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/page/news/37556/Pavements_Wowee_Zowee_to_Be_Reissued#37556

Wowee Zowee is right. Following in the footsteps of their 2002 reissue of Pavement's 1992 debut album Slanted & Enchanted and their 2004 reissue of 1994's Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, Matador will reissue Pavement's fan-favorite third studio release, 1995's Wowee Zowee.

While a tracklist, release date, and load of additional information are still in the works, a few exciting tidbits about the reissue have been revealed by the folks at Matador.

Wowee Zowee version 2.0 will include around twenty album covers by Steve Keene, a never-before-heard concert from the WZ tour, and a number of previously unreleased tracks and rarities, many of which are alternate takes. And that's all we know right now, sorry!

Kool!

They should reprint, in the liner booklet, that song-by-song rundown SM did in Raygun: "Fear of aging, fear of Limbaugh"...

I was pretty dissapointed by a lot of the extra songs on the CR CR re-release.

And I'm never a big fan of "alternate takes" as bonus tracks.

(I'll still buy this, of course!)

So wait, there was no audience? The band wore earplugs?

[/pedant dork]

Aside from the White Stripes, or maybe Modest Mouse, no rock band has since come out of the gate with such greatness on their first four releases.

Just needed to say that.

"the greatest four-record run in rock history"

this album sounds great

there's a lot of hardpanning going on with a lot of the instruments, interesting

yeah, i think this is their best-produced record, even though it has the reputation of being the weirdest/most difficult. nice guitar tones, lots of layers.

This is the Sordid Sentinels edition? The booklet was fucking great, makes buying albums worth it.

I've never compared the Sordid Sentinels version with the original issue, but either way you slice it, this is hands down my favorite Pavement record. I've heard several people express how much they like it on shuffle, but for me it's perfectly sequenced, just a great ride all the way through.

i just bought the regular vinyl version available on the matador site, was only $12 for a double LP, looks about 120 gram vinyl, and all of matador's vinyl is pressed at RTI iirc, so it's dope official on wax

This is cute:

http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kwurhvtxMK1qz87jlo1_400.jpg

really only $12?! huh kinda want it now.

is Wowee Zowee on vinyl still 3 sides? The original release had etchings on the fourth side ...

I have what I thought was an original release (it's not the recent reissue anyway)...it's blank on side 4, no etching.

eh, maybe i'm thinking of something else ... i don't have it on vinyl, a friend did ...

tylerw, now you've got me confused. i know psychic hearts (released the same year?) had etchings on the fourth side, but now i wonder if wz had the drawing from the inside of the gatefold etched on the fourth side. of course i'm at work so i can't verify the latter.

maybe i'm thinking of psychic hearts? i'm confused too.

both had side 4 etchings.

thread title keeps beckoning

i never realised it had three sides! the flow of it kind of makes more sense to me now

lol mp3 generation

My copy side 4 has no etchings, it's just blank.

(purchased around 1998)

i bought mine the day it came out - no etching

Maybe only certain copies had the Steve Keane etching?

and says a bunch of Malkmus slogans.

yeah my copy does not have an etching, bought it when it came out

mysteeeeeerious

My copy had an etching when I bought it, but now the etching has vanished!

http://frooliemew.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/cast.jpg

lol no etching on mine either

it's possible i was high as a teenager listening to this and etched something on it myself.

hahaha, i need to find my copy. pretty sure about this dudes!

OK thanks to ILM I am going to listen to this RIGHT NOW for the first time in years

You will NOT be disappointed.

it's a great record! i remember when it came out, my family was going to cooperstown to visit the baseball hall of fame. i made my dad stop at a random mall where there was a record store -- The WALL, I think? -- and I bought it there. So I kinda associate it with Willie Mays and Lou Gehrig and so forth. Memories.

I've definitely seen the etching and remembered it being a Steve Keane thing as well. But I don't own one. It might have been my college radio station's vinyl copy. Maybe it was only on promos?

it's weird that I can't google up anything about this existing

the one i just received from matador has a blank fourth side, no etchings of any kind

but this is obv a repress, has the new Low Price sticker that says free download on it

favorite pavement album no contest--and one of the great stoner records

one of the great stoner records