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

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

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