Wowee Zowee

Pavement | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (June 23, 1999)
• Original Release Date: 1995
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Matador Records
• ASIN: B00000JHAL
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  Audio Cassette  |  Vinyl  |  MP3 Music
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (72 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #82,304 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)
  • #100 in Music > Indie Music > Alternative Rock > American Alternative

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 28 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars There's a great twelve-song album in these eighteen tracks January 16, 2001

By Devon Reed

Format:Audio CD

Depending on who you talk to, Wowee Zowee is either one of Pavement's greatest masterstrokes, or a bastard child they sent down the river to their unsuspecting fans. Personally, I'd balk at the idea of labeling it at all, since the album's deliberate obliqueness almost defies categorization. Taken purely as a musical artifact to be dusted off and examined though, Wowee Zowee stands as the purest testament to the warped kaleidoscope of Steven Malkmus' mind. If the previous albums were showcases for Malkmus' peerless ability to ransack the past and mold his own vision from the spoils, then Wowee Zowee simply makes the thievery a little less veiled. For while the album sports its share of true Pavement songs, especially in the near flawless first half, they feel overshadowed by the genre experiments and song fragments which punctuate the album's eighteen-song length.

Despite this disjointed nature, with epics like "Rattled By The Rush" and "Fight This Generation" standing among the pedal steel beauty of "Father To A Sister Of Thought," the Stereolab drone of "Half A Canyon," and the punk burst of "Serpentine Pad," the album doesn't really feel like a mess. That's probably because Pavement wisely pared most of the experiments down to the two-minute mark and let the fully-formed works shine a little longer (the exceptions to each rule being "Half A Canyon" and "Black Out," respectively). As for the song order, I'm not sure if any thought at all went into the album's sequence, though at the same time I'm not sure I could have done any better. After all, the drunken hilarity of "Brinx Job" seems just as good as any other song to bridge the carefully considered works on either side, when one considers that even some of the individual songs on the album (like "Grave Architecture") are in and of themselves cases of conflicting identities.

There are some who see this as Pavement's most deliberately anti-pop album, and listening to a live recording of a pre-Wowee Zowee concert, I became acutely aware of the straightforward work it could have been. Gems like "Black Out," "Grounded" (Malkmus' ode to his doctor and his collection of German automobiles) and an instrumental "Brinx Job", when removed from the clutter of unimpressive tracks like "Flux=Rad" and "Western Homes", show that Malkmus indeed had the goods to deliver an album cut from the cloth of its predecessor, the landmark Crooked Rain Crooked Rain. On top of all that, you've got Scott Kannberg's best Pavement song ("Kennel District"), the soaring guitar work of "Pueblo," and the perfect absurdity of "AT&T." So maybe this was supposed to be Malkmus' retreat from the spotlight, but like say, Nirvana's In Utero, Wowee Zowee ultimately proves that Pavement can hardly even try to make an alienating beast of their music.

In the end, Wowee Zowee is the least immediately accessible work of Pavement's discography, and consequentially one deserving of repeated listens. Somewhere in the chaos of these eighteen tracks is a great twelve-song album, and the joy of the record is finding it. At the end of "Black Out," Malkmus wonders aloud, "Up on the trail high/I need to know/Where does it go/How do I get there/And what will I find?" The winding path of Wowee Zowee may not reveal itself immediately, but it's well worth the journey.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars the best pavement album- works on every level October 7, 2000

By Michael Kayser

Format:Audio CD

When people talk about pavement they tend to "apologize" for the band's excesses (e.g. serpentine pad, brinx job) by referring to it as fun, ironic posturing. that's true to a certain extent, but if there wasn't a lot of genuine emotion behind those songs, they'd wear thin after a few listens, and you'd only tolerate it if you were in a jokey mood. What I've come to realize is that on this album, pavement attains possibly its greatest depth of emotion of all their albums. "Brighten the corners" may have catchier melodies (open to debate, but quite possible), but as one reviewer said, it wears a little thin on repeated listenings-- the reason, I think, is that the emotion isn't as genuine: it comes across as a forced sort of irony that isn't always convincing. In contrast, some of the songs on WZ will sound really weird the first time you hear them, but give the album a lot of listens and I think you'll notice: the lyrics begin to make sense in oblique, stream-of-consciousness ways, the angst, annoyance, anger, frustration, (joy?) etc. of malkmus & co start to come out quite convincingly and you begin to get that empathic connection with the music that's really quite rare.

That's a lot of typing to have to read, but suffice it to say: this album is spectacularly, uniquely moving and works well on a bunch of emotional levels. plus it's fun to listen to and it'll satisfy that "indier-than-thou" craving we all get from time to time. :)

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Solid gold soundz November 13, 2004

By Clare Quilty

Format:Audio CD

For whatever subconscious reason we sometimes revisit music we haven't listened to in years, I've been going back through a Pavement phase lately.

The other day I was sitting around trying to make a mix of their songs for myself. I threw my favorite odities off the singles on there, four from "Crooked Rain," and then I listened to "Wowie" for the first time in years just to kind of refresh my memory of the songs I liked the most. And it occurred to me: I like all of these songs. You got 18 numbers, they're all weird, they're all full of hooks and weird sounds -- pretty great and I ended up loading more than half of the record onto my mix.

"Wowie" doesn't have the Maiden Voyage cache of "Slanted," nor is it The Breakthrough of "Crooked Rain." And it may be too diverse and smart for its own good but, damn, if it doesn't kick it. Underappreciated but bountiful in its rewards.