Pitchfork

Pavement played my hometown back in October. It was the first time I'd seen them. In fact, I bought my first Pavement album only weeks before the show. How I managed to be a 25-year-old college graduate that had never been into Pavement is a long and winding story, and I will not get into it. Suffice it to say that I knew next to nothing about the band as I walked into the theater. When I walked out, I knew only a little more: I knew that Stephen Malkmus was a crazy motherfucker; I knew the band had played a great show; I knew that the band sometimes played really bad shows; and I knew that somehow Bob Nastanovich had gotten my job.

While lingering outside as people filed out into the street, I noticed that maybe one in five were softly humming "Major Leagues." Now, Pavement had played a lot of songs-- oldies and crowd favorites alike-- and they'd played "Major Leagues" about halfway through the set. But somehow that was the song that stuck with people after they left the show. They milled about on the sidewalk singing under their breath. They whistled the chorus and bobbed their heads. They told each other that bad girls were always bad girls, and they nodded in agreement and in time. Swinging from a lamppost, my friend Ben serenaded the whole crowd with it, and soon people joined in one by one, until we were all swaying in time, dancing on cars and crashing our lager-filled steins together above our heads.

So, yes. "Major Leagues" is a great song. It's like Stephen Malkmus stops being Mark E. Smith so that he can be Lloyd Cole for a while. It's almost unquestionably the best song on Terror Twilight, and a great reason to put out an EP like this one. And this is a good EP, too.

Now, as somebody relatively new to Pavement, I will freely admit that I know not of which I speak. There's a lot of Pavement that I've not heard. I have only a fuzzy idea of the difference between a Spiral Stairs song and an S.M. song. I've read some other reviews of this EP, and most have basically brushed it aside as tossed-off. Maybe those people are right-- they are cooler than me, and they know more about Pavement than I do.

For me, though, this EP was a great find. It's got everything an EP is supposed to have: a radio edit of an album track, a goofy Casio-powered demo of the same track, three original non-album songs (one of which features Malkmus speaking French-- classic EP fodder), and two covers. I guess it is pretty tossed-off, but excellently so.

Basically, I think an EP should do two things: give you a little extra inexpensive treat to bring home from the record shop, and provide at least two or three songs for a mix tape. This one succeeds in both regards, and that's enough for me. Factor in the recent "hiatus" news and the fact that this may well represent the end of Pavement's recording career, and it becomes especially worth picking up.