Two Decades on, Pavement’s Terror Twilight Remains an Exquisitely Artful Snapshot of a Band Who Had Already Unraveled
Matador’s final installment of the legendary indie pioneers’ reissue campaign captures bandleader Stephen Malkmus chafing against not only his bandmates, but also the very aesthetic he’d created
Inevitably, all art movements reach an endpoint—or so we like to tell ourselves. The truth is that trends never actually die, but instead just relinquish their place at the forefront of culture, slipping out of vogue, where they continue to exert tremendous influence regardless. Let’s set aside for a moment that “Harness Your Hopes,” a b-side that appears on the new reissue of Pavement’s Spit on a Stranger EP, just went viral on TikTok. (Because, honestly, no one could’ve seen that coming and it’s a bit of a head-scratcher.) Generally speaking, we can still find the iconic indie-rock outfit’s fingerprints all over contemporary music. These days, anyone from any genre can incorporate a sense of DIY thrift into their musical identity, and it’s thanks in large part to Pavement.
Our widespread acceptance, in fact, of SoundCloud as a haven for all levels of production ability can arguably be traced back to the playful amateurism of the band’s era-defining full-length debut, 1992’s Slanted and Enchanted. Something of a sleeper underground hit for Matador Records, Slanted and Enchanted secured Pavement’s status, alongside Sebadoh and Guided By Voices, as standard-bearers of the lo-fi aesthetic and counter-mainstream ethic that would define indie rock for the better part of the decade. Flying in the face of just about every popular musical trend to emerge from that period—including grunge, alternative rock, Britpop, golden-age hip-hop, death metal, nu metal, electronica, trip-hop, etc.—Pavement embodied a sense that they were too cool for whatever pop culture burped up for public consumption.
Basically, you could say that Pavement weaponized irony the way ’70s punks had weaponized nihilistic rage. And for a certain subset of ’90s youth, sneering at everything in their path gave them a way to cope. The posture wasn’t without its charms, either—after all, it helped yield so many of the clever genre subversions that we hear on landmark Pavement titles like 1994’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain and 1995’s Wowee Zowee. With those records, Pavement effectively assumed the role of musical high priests of a pervasive cynicism that one also sees reflected in the cinema of the time. Looking back, it makes perfect sense that the band struck such a deep nerve.
By the end of the decade, the landscape had shifted, as it always does. Looking back, it’s tempting to assume that Pavement’s demise was a matter of course because regime change was heavy in the air. And so one can read Terror Twilight as the work of a band who found themselves so out of place from their surroundings that they had no choice but to self-destruct. The problem with that reading, though convenient, is that it doesn’t square with what’s actually on the record, now available in its Farewell Horizontal edition, the final installment of Matador Records’ lavish Pavement reissue campaign. As fans have come to expect, the new package comes crammed with extras.
Although the extras shed little light on the album itself (except to underscore the difficulty surrounding its creation), Terror Twilight in its original form shows us very clearly that Pavement hadn’t fallen out of step with the times at all. They’d actually taken a leap forward with each successive album, and Terror Twilight shares some characteristics with then-contemporary releases by the likes of Pulp and Spoon. Of course, Terror Twilight may as well have come from a different galaxy than Slanted and Enchanted. Produced by Nigel Godrich—by then already a household name for the simultaneously dense and silky ambience he’d captured on Radiohead’s OK Computer and Beck’s Mutations—the music unsurprisingly benefits from a richer, more refined mix than Pavement were known for.
Even working with a bonafide producer in the first place was somewhat antithetical to the band’s DNA. But as ear candy, nothing else in Pavement’s catalog matches what Godrich was able to construct out of their raw material. You can spend endless listens savoring all the fine-tuned details: a high-pitched hum that persists like a soft neon glow throughout “You Are a Light”; a keyboard that falls away as if disintegrating into the emptiness of space on “Cream of Gold,” the main guitar line forming a bright arc like a layer of ozone around the earth; a delicate piano tinkle that casts glimmers of sunshine on the placid waves of “Ann Don’t Cry”; etc., etc. Throughout, every strummed chord, every plucked note, every thumped drum head rings out before tapering off in an exquisitely artful application of reverb that has become Godrich’s calling card.
And then there are the gauzy soundscapes, courtesy of Godrich, that drift between some of the songs. To be fair, his mix hardly constitutes a radical jump from the smooth, colorful sheen of 1997’s Brighten the Corners. And yes, there are moments when Terror Twilight reflects the zany spirit of Wowee Zowee: the rowdy screech of “Billie,” the imposter jazz of “Speak, See, Remember,” the outhouse banjo and chicken-chasing cadence of “Folk Jam,” the crumpled sounds that blow by like street trash in the wind as “Platform Blues” picks up its pace, a disheveled heap of song running to catch a bus in clown shoes, the sudden squalls of atonal guitar freakout that punctuate many of the songs …