Pavement
Wowee Zowee (Matador)
by Marc Hirsh

originally published in the Public News, May 31, 1995

It's hard to tell where this year's Pavement is coming from or where they're headed. Country music looms large as an influence throughout, what with the slow "We Dance" starting things off like Neil Young in one of his acoustic moods. The last three songs on the album pick up on this thread with a vengeance, and there are sprinklings of lap steel throughout the album. But then there are oddities like the almost straight punk of "Flux = Rad" and the Zeppelinesque "Fight This Generation" and "Rattled By The Rush," the latter of which sounds like they're pissed off at Stone Temple Pilots' cover of "Dancing Days" and want to rectify things by writing their own.

Unfortunately for the band's grand vision, there are too many songs that aren't given the opportunity to develop. "Black Out," "Brinx Job" and others stop before they really go anywhere (although "Serpentine Pad" doesn't sound like it really had anywhere to go), and their endings sound like Pavement just plain ran out of ideas. When a band sounds like it's giving up on a song, why include it in the first place?

The fully-realized tunes are almost good enough to throw off the taint of the half-baked ones. "Father to a Sister of a Thought" and "AT&T" each pick things up after separate bunches of confused songs, and from "Kennel District" on out, Pavement conducts one of the fiercest and most effective musical damage control campaigns on record. As usual, I can't figure out what Stephen Malkmus is singing most of the time and therefore have no idea what the songs are about. No big deal, though; R.E.M.'s been getting away with it for years.

I'm trying to like Wowee Zowee, I really am. I'm not entirely sure I don't. What I want is to spend a lot more time with it and figure out just what makes it tick. Which is probably the sign of a great album. But you didn't hear that from me.

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