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

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.