760. Pavement - Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain (1994)

Track Listing

1. Silence Kit
2. Elevate Me Later
3. Stop Breathin
4. Cut Your Hair
5. Newark Wilder
6. Unfair
7. Gold Soundz
8. 5-4 = Unity
9. Range Life
10. Heaven Is A Truck
11. Hit the Plane Down
12. Fillmore Jive

Review

I loved this. I don't know if I loved it more or less than Slanted and Enchanted or less, but I loved it differently. To me that is a mark of a great band, when it can produce albums that you love for different reasons, that are complementary rather than repetitious.

This is, unlike Slanted, a much more sleekly produced album. The music, however, makes the best of that sleeker production and it is astonishing to see Malkmus moving from Lou Reed to Mark E. Smith to Dave Brubeck in the space of half an hour while making it all sound like Pavement.

This is one of those albums that really feels timeless, it hasn't dated one jot since it was recorded 14 years ago, if it came out today it would be as great as it is here. Highly Recommended.

Track Highlights

1. Gold Soundz
2. Cut Your Hair
3. Filmore Jive
4. Elevate Me Later

Final Grade

10/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Due to an ink splodge on the back of the original artwork, the song "Silence Kid" has become erroneously known as "Silence Kit". This misnomer persisted when designer Mark Ohe printed it onto the back of the re-issue Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain: LA's Desert Origins, despite the interior artwork showing the correct name in print several times, including written in Stephen Malkmus's own handwriting.

It was chosen as #8 on Pitchfork Media's Top 100 Albums of the 1990s In 2003, the album was ranked number 210 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.

It was also mentioned in the Kevin Devine song "Probably," from his album Split the Country, Split the Street. In the song, Devine sings the lyric, "And you probably don't care for punk rock, but you probably love Crooked Rain."

Gold Soundz: