Slanted & Enchanted

Great!

Slanted & Enchanted is the type or album that you hear and upon first listen, you probably won't appreciate what you just experienced. However, it lingers in the back of your mind and it keeps finding its way back into your stereo.

The first time I heard this record many years ago, I wrote it off as amateur junk. These days, I'm a bit more cynical of rock and roll and popular music, in general. Now, Pavement's first album comes into focus. Music can become easily predictable, boxed in and uninspiring. You can hear it in the lame chord progressions and pathetic lyrics of any band part of the current pop trend. Slanted And Enchanted has lots of neat tricks, in juxtaposition to all the "normal" junk out there. The guitars here use alternate tunings; sometimes they're not even in tune at all. The songs change tempo and style almost instantaneously, throwing the listener's ear for a loop. Cleanliness to distortion, quiet to crescendo. The album gives off a drugged-out vibe, slightly psychedelic in its' nonchalance, its' cavalier atmosphere. But it's also very punk... with prog-rock sensibility, but too vague, the members to cool for such labels. Sometimes the songs cut out all together, like their recording machine ate the tape. The lyrics are famously improvised, containing non-sequitors, a strange string of words--sung in a voice that talks more than sings, sometimes screams or whines. Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, etc., are certainly the inspiration here. It's completely original. Listen immediately!

Had the CD of this album and wanted to give the record copy as a gift. Got to me in one piece and looks and feels good. Word.

Love this album, vinyl is amazing!

excellect

Pavement was something of a revelation to me when I was in high school, in that it was neither noisy and abrasive, nor slick and pretty, which tend to be the polar extremes around which rock music orbits. It was this weird middle ground where everything was a just a little bit off kilter somehow, and the stories they told didn't quite add up, but somehow the urgent sense of dissatisfaction came across loud as day.I think you have to take this album in context with the era it was released in. In 1992, alternative rock had just barely begun to supplant hair metal as the genre of choice on modern rock radio. Alternative rock was a pretty big tent back in those days, and it had room for music that was really only a slight departure from hair metal as well as stuff that was only just slightly within the realm of rock music in general.Pavement staked out a new territory that was eventually labeled as slacker rock and dismissed with great derision, mostly due to some of the pale imitations that somehow scored one-hit-wonder status on MTV heavy rotation. Marcy Playground, I'm looking at you there.In fact, you could probably argue the territory wasn't really new at all, but rather just a remapping of ground that had already been covered by the likes of The Fall or The Jesus and Mary Chain or the Meat Puppets or any one of few dozen other seminal icons of the alternative rock era.Whatever the case may be, Slanted and Enchanted is the album that really got me excited about listening to new music at that time period, instead of just digging up really old albums that had been released a decade or more prior, but that I hadn't heard yet.Summer Babe is the classic paean to unfulfilled longing or perhaps unarticulated longing. My eyes stick to all those shiny robes you wear on the protein delta strip in an abandoned houseboat, sings Stephen Malkmus in his most insouciant croon. I still don't really understand what he means, but having now been to places like Oroville and Chico, California, I'm picturing some kind of scene of reckless abandon played out under the hot summers of Central Valley, between the roar of the interstate freeways and quiet calm of the unending expanses of farmland. I will wait there, he sings, I'll be waiting forever.You think it's easy, but you're wrong, Malkmus admonishes the listener casually on Zurich Is Stained. I am not one-half of the problem, and it's not my fault. Perhaps he is addressing the legions of detractors that sprang up in the wake of the slacker rock phenomenon. That kind of strength I just don't have.I remember hearing the Afghan Whigs - those strident proclaimers of loudly exaggerated lothario angst - playing a live cover of In The Mouth A Desert. Can you treat it like an oil-well when it's underground, out of sight, asked the animated Greg Dulli, spit flying from his sweat soaked face with every consonant syllable. It was probably the opposite of the way Pavement played that song, but I think it's as good of a testament as any to the remarkable songwriting skills they displayed on this album.The highlight of the album is probably the hopeless dirge-like ballad, Here. Come join us in a prayer, sings Malkmus, we'll be waiting, waiting where everything's ending, here. His voice goes from a croon to a mumble to a falsetto whine. I think it's a strikingly beautiful song.I realize that this music is probably anathema to people coming from a certain point of view, but to me it's vibrant and telling, even if it's quiet and mumbly in parts. That quietness kind of reinforces that dynamics of the choruses in places, as well as the inscrutable wordplay of the lyrics. It's an album with style. Miles and miles, in fact.So much style that it's wasted.

Nothing special

Obra maestra de principio a fin!!!

This was bought as a gift for my son. He is very happy with it.

Perfetto. Nuovo sigillato

この作品いやこのバンドは恐ろしいほどに美しいT1を初めて聞いた時の衝撃は形容できない我々人間は非常に脆い生物だ。圧倒的美を目の前にした時なにもできやしない。

Excellent debut album from Pavement, The Fall are an immediate influence here but if you are going to be influenced by anyone, I can't think of many groups better than The Fall.