Pavement - The Hexx and Box Elder

Pavement was the best band I never heard of while I was in high school. I didn't discover them until my buddy back in college put some Pavement on a mix CD during my last year of college. "Spit on a Stranger" was the first cut from Terror Twilight, the last album that Pavement put out. It was still another couple of years before I started dutifully collecting the other Pavement studio albums. I know that I can still see Stephen Malkmus perform if I find myself in the right place at the right time with enough money in my pocket. But I have forever missed the energy of an early Pavement performance. After sticking to a nearly strictly Pavement diet about 4 years ago, I weaned myself for a little while and have just been revisiting again. Blah blah blah on to the songs...

"The Hexx" landed on Terror Twilight. Here's a live recording of part of that song so you can get a sense of the sort of "preppie/straight guys go slightly punk and obtuse" style that Pavement was bringing in the late season of their game. Unfortunately, you don't get some of the crisp guitar elements that show up in the album cut, which I included in the next video below.

Here's the studio album cut, check out the echo-y guitar calls around 2:20, and the spacy-bluesy solo that starts at 3:35. It descends into distorted, rocky arpeggiating... and it's great for some supreme mellow air guitar sessions.


The other song I want to throw up on here is Box Elder, MO. This is from the early end of Pavement. Quirky lyrics and phrasing were a Stephen Malkmus hallmark from the beginning, but Box Elder had pretty straightforward lyrical content and straightforward rockiness was the musical vessel of delivery. Although the recording posted here doesn't quite do it justice (it's from a DVD commemorating the 10th anniversary of the album Slanted Enchantment) you can probably pick up on the simple but effective, quasi-epic-anthemic arpeggios and the dissonant, but not distorted guitar harmonics, which have a surprisingly hooky rhythm. You can also watch the happy-go-lucky seated frolicking of the early drummer Gary Young, who was eventually asked to leave the band for his constant drunken shenanigans that caused disruptions to performances.


This acoustic performance of Malkmus at the Knitting Factory from a couple of years ago give you the lyrics a little more clearly, and give you sense of the less abstract side of his songwriting. The verbal concepts and messages are mostly direct, but the casual non-sequitir or abstract image slips in now and then, too. Now that I've annoyed myself with my analysis, here's the video.