Actually, a lot of words rhyme with Pavement...

Estrangement, enslavement, disengagement....

Cool article from Pitchfork (see below) with great videos of Pavement from back in the day... Not news to anyone who actually saw them then or during the more recent reunion shows.

Looking forward to seeing Malkmus on tour next month... It was cool to see him acknowledge Parquet Courts in a recent interview.... They are definitely the spiritual heirs of Pavement... Austin of Parquet Courts told me how much he loved jamming with Spiral Stairs and how they saw themselves as mining the same veins as Pavement... rich psychedelic ore, aye....

from Rolling Stone:

Have you heard Parquet Courts?

Those guys are cool. I was in this hamburger place the other day in Portland – they were playing the Parquet Courts record and I thought it was Pavement.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/stephen-malkmus-on-why-everyone-wants-to-be-a-nineties-kid-20140103

http://pitchfork.com/thepitch/233-invisible-hits-pavement-in-1994/

Proof That Pavement Didn't Suck Live

By Tyler Wilcox, February 13, 2014 at 11:50 a.m.

Welcome to the first installment of Invisible Hits, a new column in which Tyler Wilcox scours the internet for the best (and strangest) bootlegs. Tyler also blogs at Doom & Gloom From the Tomb. This time, in honor of the 20th anniversary of Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, he's dug up some killer archival footage of Pavement.

"They're terrible live."

If you mentioned Pavement back in the 90s, that statement was usually not far behind. But all these years later—and a day shy of Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain's 20th birthday, at that—can we finally put that argument to rest? Stephen Malkmus has always had too mercurial a temperament to simply cruise through note-perfect versions of his tunes; he likes to fuck around with his creations. He’s still known to change lyrics at will, play radically different guitar solos, try out new tempos. Which is why for some fans, Pavement gigs could be frustrating. But for people entertained and compelled by the now-ness of a live performance, Pavement was an oddly bewitching onstage presence.

1994 marked a particularly strange moment for the band. Riding high on four years of critical hosannas and armed with an album that showed no signs of the dreaded sophomore slump, this was supposed to be the year Pavement broke through to the mainstream. Things didn’t quite work out that way, and with hindsight, it’s easy to see why. While Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain was the band’s most accessible set of tunes thus far, it was also packed to the brim with ambivalence about the prospect of rock stardom. And if there’s one thing that kills buzz, it’s ambivalence.

You can see Pavement’s uneasiness all too clearly in two clips from that year. At an unnamed festival that summer, we see the band whipping the crowd into a frenzy with a demonic "Unfair", Nastanovich howling righteously, Malkmus barely able to contain his glee. But then, without missing a beat, Pavement shuts the mosh pit down, seguing into a goofy instrumental rendition of the then-unreleased "Brinx Job".

Then, famously, Malkmus greeted Jay Leno’s late night audience on "The Tonight Show" with a bout of atonal screeching, before leading the band through that almost-smash-hit, "Cut Your Hair." What did Branford Marsalis think?

But this amazing, semi-professional video of a gig in Frankfurt in March of that year tells a different story. Great songs were pouring out of Malkmus with frightening regularity during this period (Neil Young’s unstoppable output circa 1973-4 comes to mind), and Pavement kicks off the set with an unreleased song, the wind-swept desert dirge "Pueblo." The band then swaggers through the bulk of the just-a-month-old Crooked Rain (skipping only "Range Life"). There are false starts and hiccups galore—new drummer Steve West briefly forgets how to play "Elevate Me Later" and Spiral Stairs disappears at one point, to the bewilderment of his bandmates. "The other guitarist just quit the group," Bob Nastanovich quips. 

Pavement play with an undeniable confidence and spirit, exploring the explosive cadences of "Silence Kit", drifting majestically on "Heaven Is A Truck", and ba-ba-ba-ing through old favorites like "Debris Slide" and "Forklift". They even excel on the stranger, more challenging material, like the falsetto-laden "Newark Wilder" and a "Stop Breathing" that builds to a thrilling finale. There’s very little in the way of ambivalence here—Pavement just sounds like a great rock band. Malkmus’ guitar work is less proggy than it would later become, but he still shreds with abandon, at times skronking up a storm à la Sonic Youth, at others slipping into a sparklingly psychedelic mode. He manages to fit it all in on the closing "Fillmore Jive", surely the only song to bring to mind both the Frogs and "Free Bird". "I need to sleep," goes the chorus, and the band responds with a cacophony that would wake the dead. 

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A good excuse, no, to take another look at my recent Malkmus video featuring Pavement's "Harness Your Hopes", Led Zeppelin's "Hairway to Stephen", I mean "Stairway to Heaven", and The Velvet Underground's "Beginning to See The Light":