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

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.