Pavemania

From Pitchfork:

It may be an overstatement to say Pavement were the Beatles of their generation, but they kinda were. What the Beatles were to ’60s pop, Pavement were to ’90s indie rock—the definitive, pace-setting act of the decade who underwent many surprising and substantial evolutions in a tidy 10-year lifespan. And upon closer inspection, their respective narratives run parallel to an uncanny extent: 1992’s epochal Slanted and Enchanted sparked the initial rush of Pavemania; 1994’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain was a Rubber Soul/Revolver-style step toward sophistication; 1995’s messterpiece Wowee Zowee was their ’67-’68 period of lawless experimentation; 1997’s Brighten the Corners was the band’s late-game Abbey Road-esque consolidation of strengths. Their mirror trajectories even extend to the streaming era, where both acts have their Spotify stats topped by songs that weren’t even released as proper singles back in the day.

And then there’s 1999’s Terror Twilight, which was Pavement’s Let It Be—and not just because it represents the finely chiseled tombstone to a brilliant career. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: What began as a loose, live-off-the-floor affair gave way to a more laborious process overseen by a big-name producer (with Nigel Godrich in the Phil Spector role) who put his fancy fingerprints all over the finished product. The result was an album that tried to reconcile the elegant and eccentric extremities of Pavement’s sound into a pristine, next-level pop statement, but instead wound up heralding the band’s demise. And in its wake, Terror Twilight left behind a troubled legacy marked by competing track sequences, divisive reactions, trash talk, and hurt feelings.

“So Much for Destiny: The Story of Pavement’s Terror Twilight”, Stuart Berman, Pitchfork