Pavement - Crooked Rain Crooked Rain
2025-03-05
This is the indie/slacker rock album, and for good reasons. It taps perfectly into whatever it was that you were feeling as an adolescent in the 90s, like throwing your worn out canvas backpack on your back and getting on the skateboard to go to your friends house to listen to tapes and maybe jam a little on the guitar. It is loose, mellow, sloppy, staggered and at times it almost feels like they cannot be bothered to actually play their parts, but do not think for a second that the sloppiness is not deliberate. Pavement were doing to alternative rock what J Dilla was doing to hip hop, making it wonky and alive in a refreshingly human way. In some ways the slacker rock genre, that Pavement was largely responsible for creating, can be seen as a reaction to the more neat and polished rock/metal of the 80s; not unlike grunge.
It probably helps if you were actually there but—even without the thick crust of nostalgia that this album possesses for many of us—it is still a great album that is both approachable and accessible while still maintaining its indie feel.
Listen
- Unfair: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEwe8PdfF_U
- Stop Breathing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAcIqwm6L5c