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Every era seems to have one group that best sums up the music of the times. If this is so, a case could be made that a certain sliver of the early-to-mid-'90s was owned by a band called Pavement.
Led by eccentric songwriter Stephen Malkmus, Pavement seemed to herald a revolution that went against everything the pop-music industry thought it knew about creating and selling rock 'n' roll.
Working through relatively tiny independent labels, the band members found (through choice or lack of funds) they could record very cheaply and still get their music across, unfiltered by the corporate music industry. Thus, the term 'indie-rock' entered the lexicon.
Underneath Malkmus' inimitable songwriting could be found the jangly pop of R.E.M. and the dissonant noise of Sonic Youth, as well as an obsessive record collector's skewed sense of rock history.
As scores of Pavement imitators were spawned in garages and basements across the country, the band continued to put out excellent albums. When the sound of the moment moved on, however, Pavement faded back into 'cult band' semi-obscurity. According to Malkmus, cracks in the Pavement gradually became apparent.
'It just ran out of gas,' he says in a phone interview. 'We all got tired of each other. You've got to be 100 percent. If you're only 90 percent, you shouldn't keep doing it.'
The main problem, it seems, was distance.
'We weren't very good at collaborating,' Malkmus says. 'We lived in different parts of the country. It was really a struggle to make it sound like a band - maybe if we were these primordial brilliant musicians like Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead, who's like a really talented freak of nature, which none of us are. We had to work at it.'
Malkmus is back now with a new band called the Jicks, and a new album that's starting to get the attention missing from the past few Pavement discs. As usual, his bizarre and inscrutable songwriting gets center stage.
Malkmus' songs easily are among the most distinctive in rock. Rarely making conventional sense the first time around, they're dense and fraught with idiosyncracies. While it sometimes sounds as though he's making lyrics up on the spot, the puns also seem too clever, the free associations too dextrous, for that to be the case.
'Ever since I was 5 years old, I could make a song that told a little story,' Malkmus says. 'Songs don't always have to come together, though. There could be a couple of lines that are not right, that are there for the rhyme.'
Subtly titled 'Stephen Malkmus,' the new album hearkens back to Pavement's 1994 release, 'Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain,' which had the playful humor of a band too clever for its own good and the lackadaisical euphoria of the first day of summer.
Malkmus' songs follow their own curious logic, always taking you somewhere different from where you started. The song 'Jo Jo's Jacket,' Malkmus says, begins with the line I'm not what you think I am. That leads to I'm the king of Siam, which leads to I've got a bald head, my name is Yul Brynner, and I am a famous movie star. Going on from Yul Brynner's perspective, it describes how great it felt to act like a robotic cowboy in the movie 'Westworld.'
Somehow, it all makes sense, and the melodies infiltrate your brain just enough to make Malkmus' strange songs stick.
Michael Machosky can be reached at (412) 320-7901 or mmachosky@tribweb.com .
