Pavement

The most irritating thing about Pavement is that the best song often shows up after you've stopped expecting it.

Stockton, California, 1989. Stephen Malkmus and Scott Kannberg start with a seven-inch. Within a few years, Pavement becomes one of the defining bands of American indie rock, carrying a persistent misunderstanding along the way: people keep confusing loose playing with a lack of care.

Pavement: Until the Tape Gives Out follows the band through all five studio albums: Slanted and Enchanted, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, Wowee Zowee, Brighten the Corners, and Terror Twilight. It stays close to the recordings, where a guitar part, a vocal hesitation, or an awkward transition can change everything.

Drawing on published interviews, contemporary reporting, and documentary sources, sORRYbOY traces the story from Gary Young's Stockton studio to the sessions with Nigel Godrich. The book examines the tensions behind the breakup, the members' subsequent careers, and the reunions, reaching the unexpected second life of Harness Your Hopes and Alex Ross Perry's film Pavements. Malkmus's lyrics and the band's cut-and-paste visual world receive the same attention as the music.

A listening discography, a chronology, and a guide to thirty songs beyond the albums open further routes through the singles, B-sides, radio sessions, and recordings that refused to stay at the catalog's edges.

By sORRYbOY, from the So Many Records I've Lost Count series.