Pavement
Cautionary Tales: Jukebox Classiques
MATADOR
My relationship with Pavement these days is like a friendship from way back with someone I went through a lot together with at a formative moment in our lives, but have been on a divergent path from ever since. Three decades on, I love them, and probably will forever in one way or another, but I don’t follow them on socials and I don’t usually come out when they’re in town. Their career-spanning singles collection Cautionary Tales: Jukebox Classiques is like finding myself at a destination wedding with one such friend, or unexpectedly seated next to them on a transatlantic flight with enough time and forced intimacy to remind me what it was that sparked our relationship in the first place, and why we drifted apart.
Cautionary Tales reproduces every single ever released by Pavement in chronological order, from the trio of lo-fi EPs that first made them darlings of the American rock underground to their final, MTV-endorsed hits. As a vinyl box set, with each 7-inch in its own reproduction sleeve, it’s a conceptually straightforward way to give fans a chance to scoop up their entire singles discography for the relatively low price of $150, and give a reliable cash cow another squeeze (the set was pre-order only, and is already sold out). But on streaming, without the tidy separation between singles, it plays as a greatest-hits collection shuffled into a deck of studio scraps, with their most transcendent moments sitting right next to creative stillbirths.
It’s a very Pavement-y way to survey the band’s progression from two backwater record geeks doing their best Mark E. Smith impressions in a local hippie’s studio to full-blown rock stars who did probably more than anyone else to bring indie rock into the mainstream. One of the most consistent, fascinating, and infuriating things about the band has always been the way they orbited between profound moments of crystalline beauty that made a worn-out genre feel shockingly new and moments where they indulge their most antisocial, adolescent impulses that spike the mood with an air of vague, sneering contempt.
You already know the hits—“Summer Babe,” “Cut Your Hair,” “Stereo”—and if you’ve done even a little digging into the band you’ve probably come across some of Cautionary Tales’ other high points, like “Box Elder,” a perfectly crafted kiss-off of a country-tinged pop song from their first EP that I could see Kacey Musgraves or Sabrina Carpenter eating up, or “Unseen Power of the Picket Fence,” an obsessive, anthemic, and ultimately surreal tribute to R.E.M.
From beginning to end, Pavement was very much about throwing things against the wall to see what stuck, and Cautionary Tales is made up more of stuff that didn’t than stuff that did. There are some nice moments scattered throughout, particularly ones where the group lets their influences shine through. “Baptist Blacktick” from the Summer Babe EP is one of the best Fall ripoffs America’s ever produced, while “Stare” shows off a krautrock influence you wouldn’t pick up from its A-side, the perfectly bubblegum “Cut Your Hair.” Some of the tracks are more illuminating than actually enjoyable: the way a lot of the middling tracks almost cohere but don’t gives some insight into their jammy approach to recording, while an adorably sincere Crooked Rain–era cover of R.E.M.’s “Camera” shows what the band might’ve sounded like without their smartass side, which turns out to be kind of pretty but also a little boring.
Pavement’s refusal to ever take themselves—or the standards of capital-R rock music, or the rules of indie cool, or even the act of creating art itself—too seriously could be irritating at times, but they also had a rare ability to deliver a flop with such cocky elan and self-aware commitment to the bit that it somehow worked. “Maybe Maybe,” like a lot of their early EPs, doesn’t have a memorable melody and isn’t actually much fun to listen to, but it’s still cool that they made it. The jerky faux-jazz excursion “Kneeling Bus” is so annoying that it has to be intentional, but coming right after the flawless pop of “Gold Soundz” it’s hilarious.
Just as you start getting caught up in your reunion and start wondering if you’d misjudged your old friend, they do something to remind you that you hadn’t. After Crooked Rain, Pavement started sounding noticeably bored, and the mood—as well as the quality of the music—started going downhill. The songs’ meandering began to feel aimless, Malkmus’s cryptic, improvisational lyrics began drifting into babbling silliness, and the tossed-off charm that animated the first half of their career began to feel like disinterest slowly curdling into resentment. Singles like “Stereo” and “Shady Lane” offer big hooks, but struggle to find something to say, and the quality of the B-sides slips even further.
“Kris Kraft” mixes irritatingly quirked-up choogle with Malkmus’s love-hate fixation with WASP culture to create something musically akin to a knockoff Wes Anderson. A 1997 cover of Echo & the Bunnymen’s “The Killing Moon” feels like an intriguing tribute to an unexpected influence until Malkmus throws a wrench in the mood by babbling a bunch of Ian McCulloch lyrics from another song in a way that sound outright mean. The droning “Saganaw,” from 1996’s Pacific Trim EP (which the group recorded mostly to use up prepaid studio time) gives me flashbacks to every time a friend of a friend played me their psych rock band and I had to struggle to find something to compliment (“I like that it’s so droning and arrhythmic!”). They aren’t fun to listen to, and the only thing they illuminate about the band is how checked-out they were before they finally rolled across the finish line.
But even if the set ends on a bum note, it doesn’t mean the whole reunion was a waste. We’re all older now and it’s easier to take people or bands as they are, without putting your own expectations onto them. I may not put on the back half of Cautionary Tales again anytime soon, but I’m happy to have the chance to reconnect and be reminded of how many pleasant memories we still share.
The other night I found an old live recording from the Cattle Club in Stockton from the band’s first tour that I used to own as a bootleg cassette and played so much that I still have the between-song banter memorized, and it felt like finding an old snapshot from back in the day. We both look so young.
