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

-- 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"