90s Album Thread: Pavement “Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain” (1994)
There’s a handful of Pavement albums I could point to, but “Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain” (1994) was my outright favorite. I still listen to it to this day, and I love it.
In the 90s, this group caused division amongst my music-loving friends. It was even worse amongst the folks who would wander into my dorm room and ask why I was listening to a “demo from a bunch of guys playing in a garage.”
But rather than be combative, I was more than willing to admit that this band could be frustrating. At times you could tell they were better than they sounded. And it was kind of hard to figure out why.
So let me tell you this: Whenever I watch a movie, read a book or listen to music, there’s a critical part of my brain that’s always working. It’s looking or listening for mistakes, and it’s relentless. I don’t always like this little critic on my shoulder trying to tell me I should determine whether something is good or bad, but he’s hard to shake loose.
What Pavement did was invite us to tell that critic to go fly a kite. Their pursuit was not perfection. There was almost a blatant disregard for it as if it didn’t matter.
Pavement was on a path toward passion. If they sounded sloppy along the way, I think they made it clear they could really give a…
