Terror Twilight [ENHANCED]

I understand all the criticisms of this album--overproduced, irrelevant compared to "Slanted and Enchanted" or "Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain", somewhat dull, almost a Steve Malkmus solo project. I didn't really like it, either, the first time I heard it, and only liked it a bit more the next twenty times I played it--until I suddenly realized I kept playing it. Over and Over. Like standing in the Louvre, staring at the Mona Lisa for hours, caught up in the enigma.

"Terror Twilight"--Never has an album been so appropriately monikered. Just like they've always done, Pavement makes concept albums about California without calling them concept albums about California. This one is all about what happens when you're in your early 30s, bored and listless, trying to recapture the enthusiasm of your early 20s (i.e., "S&E"). Instead of skateboarding home from your job at the cafe, now you're driving a Lexus, stuck in rush hour traffic, coming back from your cubicle job at some software company. I don't think I'm wrong about this.

Until I discovered Pavement. I was somewhat at a loss as to where to place this review. I love all five of their official albums, and I think that Slanted and Enchanted is probably still their best. Still, Terror Twilight has grown on me to the point that the hooks, melodies, and lyrics have become indelible.

Since I'm a middle-aged guy, my opinion may not mean much to Pavement's basic audience (or what I imagine is their audience). But from the point of view of a guy who has heard it all (or at least a lot of it), entered college when Purple Haze was in the Top 40, and been listening ever since, take it from me: Pavement can stand with the best of them!

There are some things in this world that we will never understand. This can be for multiple reasons - from sheer complexity, to epistemic ignorance, to the encroachment upon a flashing insight to which we cannot fully comprehend. Steven Malkmus exists somewhere around these categories; perhaps even severing the boundaries between them in some odd karmic dance that incarnates him as a prophet or a devil. But none of this existential rambling really matters at all. The brillinace of Pavement is in helping us realize this for the purpose of just enjoying the music.

I don't know what "children in electric dresses" are. I may never know what "bright red ropes, periscopes, they've got every thing you would ever need stored under a chair" means. Or I may never know the significance of "a fetus in a jar".

But Pavement eschews complete incoherentism with delicate subtlety. "Cream of Gold" begins with the lyrics, "So much for destiny...Time is a one way track and I am not coming back/I dream in biege/Why'd you lead me so far now?" Here we hearken to an unusual sense of personalism and we seem to find a balance - a balance that is kept tentative by the signature rough and unpolished nature of the band itself. This is not a drug trip, nor is it the vacuous droning of innuermerable bands who wish they had something to be angry about. It is not a plastic version of chaos that punctures our ears, or the gossamer anti-melodies of over-produced celebrities acting as stand ins for true passion. It is more like someone waking us up to help us heal from the night before when we drank a little too much - a good friend who knows from experience that coffee and nicotene do not help a hangover.

So we awake from our painful sleep that never seems to extinguish the desire for more, hit play on the stereo, and gently tune into spontaneous cohesison that emerges out of the usual chaotic blend of cacophonous overtures and fragmented words. On some deeper, intuitive level, it all makes sense. So sit down, have a cold one, and realize that over-analyzing can drown out a good thing with the interrupting voices of our own thoughts. But perhaps I have overstated the issue... Give it a listen. This review may be pointless after all.