If Slanted and Enchanted was Pavement’s brilliant accident — garage-sale amps, cryptic in-jokes, and the kind of confidence only born of not caring — then Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain was the moment they started wondering what it meant to be a “real band.” Split between New York City studios and their scruffy hometown of Stockton, California, the recording itself mirrors the album’s personality: half reaching for bigger stages, half stubbornly clinging to the garage. It has just enough polish to suggest maturity but still sounds like it might unravel mid-song. Which is, of course, the point.
“Goodnight to the rock ‘n’ roll era, ’cause they don’t need you anymore.”
Their influences peek through in ways both reverent and irreverent. You can hear the Velvet Underground’s weary cool in the guitar tones, R.E.M.’s jangle in the melodies, the Fall’s gleeful chaos in the edges. But instead of paying homage, Pavement treats those predecessors like a pile of thrift-store shirts — try one on, wear it until it smells, toss it in the corner. What comes out is something that only could have been made in the mid-’90s: a record that seems to be both mocking and preserving the idea of rock and roll itself.
That tension is obvious right from “Silence Kid,” the opener that sounds like Pavement trying to be a bar band and failing spectacularly. Guitars wander, drums stagger into coherence, and yet somehow the whole thing lands. It’s a reminder that this band was always too smart to play dumb and too restless to play slick.
The progression from Slanted to Crooked is real, though. Stephen Malkmus’s lyrics start to show their seams — no longer just cryptograms muttered into fuzz but stories, half-sketched and half-true. On Slanted and their early EPs Slay Tracks, Westing (By Musket and Sextant), and especially on the brilliant Watery, Domestic, you felt like you’d stumbled into a party where everyone already knew the joke. On Crooked Rain, Malkmus starts letting you in, while still keeping the punchline half a beat away. “Gold Soundz” is a perfect example: it is a love song (more precisely, a song about love), except the love is covered in static electricity. There’s warmth, vulnerability even, but the words slip through your fingers when you try to hold them. That’s Malkmus in a nutshell — half sincerity, half dodgeball.
Of course, irony doesn’t keep the rent paid, and Crooked Rain is also the closest Pavement ever came to a hit. “Cut Your Hair” slipped onto MTV as an unlikely novelty hit, its surreal barber-chair video making Pavement look both ridiculous and undeniable. The song, a satire of the music industry’s obsession with packaging, accidentally became the package. Malkmus was right: “Career, career, career…” is both a sneer and a confession. Pavement briefly touched the mainstream by making fun of it, which is a kind of poetic justice you can only pull off once.
The influence of this record is everywhere. Modest Mouse lifted the jittery humor and stretched it into manic road trips. Horsegirl took the wiry guitars and is bending them into their own art-school racket. Courtney Barnett found in Malkmus a model for making confessionals sound like shrugs. Parquet Courts basically treat Crooked Rain as a sacred text. Every artist and band that’s ever been described as “slacker-genius” owes this record royalties.
The other side of Crooked Rain is its commentary on rock and roll’s own absurdity. “Range Life” is the most obvious swipe, and yes, the infamous jabs at Smashing Pumpkins and Stone Temple Pilots still feel like a middle-school note passed across the classroom: mean, funny, and just enough truth to sting. But the real heart of the song isn’t the insults — it’s the road-weary melancholy, the realization that mocking your peers doesn’t cancel out your own loneliness. For all their irony, Pavement understood that behind the satire was the ache of wanting to belong to something without selling yourself to it.
And then there’s “Fillmore Jive,” the closing track, which plays like the sound of a party slowly collapsing. It’s messy, sprawling, and refuses the triumphant finale any other band would have tried to deliver. Pavement’s version of a curtain call is to leave the stage while the amps are still feeding back. Again, the joke is also the point.
Even the album art participates in the conversation: a scribbled collage that looks like it was torn from a high-school notebook and then unintentionally left in the copy machine. It’s both casual and deliberate, evoking the same “we care, but not too much” ethos as the music. The cover says: we’re in the rock tradition, but don’t expect us to color inside your stadium-tour lines.
What Crooked Rain ultimately says about love, humor, and the music industry is that none of them is to be taken at face value. Love is real, but it’s complicated and fleeting; humor is a shield, but also a kind of tenderness; the industry is absurd, but somehow you’re still stuck playing the game. It’s a record about contradictions that never resolve, which is why it continues to resonate thirty years later.
Crooked Rain works best in late afternoon, sometime in April or May, when the light is tilted and the day feels half-finished. It’s for moments when you’re restless but not sure whether to leave the house, ideally while hanging with the kind of friend who will sit on a porch couch in East Atlanta Village with you, trade sarcastic one-liners, and then suddenly, without irony, reveal something honest.
Pavement never became huge, which is probably for the best, and why they sound so timeless. Their shrug toward the mainstream has aged into something deeper than indifference — it feels like clarity. Crooked Rain is the rare record that makes fun of rock and roll while reminding you why it’s still worth caring about. Which, for all the jokes and jabs, is as sincere as it gets.
Megan’s favorite song on the album is “Range Life” for its melancholic undertones of an aching loneliness. It’s a tale as old as time, like a Disney princess wishing she could leave her castle for the day and live a normal village life. Malkmus takes an inside-looking-out view from his fame as he daydreams out of the window at what could’ve been. He yearns to be like the young kids he observes, care-free to every responsibility and blind to the messed-up parts of the life he may have once prayed for. But, Malkmus has “made it” in terms of musical success, and in this sad, siloed bed he must lie. This doesn’t come without him begging the question, “What if I had chosen to be like them instead? Could I have been happy? Even happier than I am now?” The answer is probably.
Out on my skateboard, the night is just humming
And the gums smacks are the pulse I’ll follow if my Walkman fades
But I’ve got absolutely no one
No one but myself to blame
Wendell’s favorite song on the album is “Gold Soundz” because it is Pavement’s most devastating trick: a breakup song disguised as a stoner sing-along. Malkmus plays the part of the too-cool boyfriend who can only admit “So drunk in the August sun / And you’re the kind of girl I like” before retreating into riddles, while the guitars jangle like they’re trying to distract you from the fact that the relationship has already collapsed. Both people in this song are too hip, too ironic, too self-protective to be kind to each other, which makes the offhand wisdom of “You can never quarantine the past” land like a confession inadvertently caught on tape. It’s heartbreak rendered as indie rock nonchalance, and it’s brutal precisely because it never raises its voice.
Pavement can be found on Bandcamp, all streaming platforms, and wherever records are sold. You are likely to find their songs played on SiriusXM stations SiriusXMU, Alt Nation, and 90’s on 9. In addition to the full Pavement catalog, you should check out Malkmus’ work on Silver Jews and his multiple solo projects. One last thing: there was that tribute-slash-mockumentary Pavements that dropped earlier this year, which we would absolutely review if it weren’t already Sammie Purcell’s territory. Let’s just say it nails the band’s essence by refusing to canonize them. Instead, it leans into the slacker wit and accidental brilliance that made Pavement both impossible to mythologize and impossible to ignore — a send-up of the music biopic that somehow feels more honest than the earnest ones.
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