walking upstream…
Pavement
photo: niwi6 · cc by-sa 3.0 ↗Pavement
In January 1989, two Stockton, California, childhood friends, Stephen Malkmus and Scott Kannberg, walked into drummer Gary Young's home studio, Louder Than You Think, and spent an afternoon cutting a handful of scraggly songs into Pavement's debut single. Malkmus's own teenage listening ran to hardcore and Van Halen; the music that actually built Pavement's sound, he has since specified, arrived later, at the University of Virginia, where a compact, specific canon reoriented him. Mark Ibold and Bob Nastanovich joined for the touring band; Young himself, an eccentric drummer and engineer, was a bandmate, not an influence. Over five studio albums (1992-99), tape hiss, detuned guitars, and deadpan irony hardened into the sound that defined American indie rock's slacker decade. Malkmus's joke-first interview persona long made the actual debt hard to pin down, until, decades later, he started naming songs.
the sound in question
1994
Gold SoundzPavement
walk the tributaries ↓
The Fall1980s · post-punk / art punk
Malkmus has spent decades deflecting influence questions with jokes, which is why his own accounting, walking through his catalogue for Rolling Stone in 2018, is worth taking straight. "There's another song on Slanted and Enchanted called 'Conduit for Sale!' that's very similar to 'New Face in Hell' by the Fall," he said, one of four Slanted and Enchanted tracks he traces, unprompted, to specific Fall songs by title. The Fall's own Mark E. Smith all but confirmed it from the other side, dismissing the record as "just the Fall in 1985."
listen: upstream & here
1980
New Face in HellThe Fall
1992
Conduit for Sale!Pavement
listen forCue up "New Face in Hell" against "Conduit for Sale!" and follow the vocal, not the riff: Mark E. Smith's flat, motor-mouthed rant refuses to land squarely on the beat, and Malkmus's yelp does the same trick over a rhythm section that lurches rather than locks. Neither song resolves into a chorus you could hum back afterward — the refusal is the shared move, on both sides of the comparison.
Can1970s · Krautrock / Experimental rock / Psychedelic rock
By his own account, the debt began at the University of Virginia, where he traded teenage punk for Can, the Clean, and the Velvet Underground. It surfaces directly on "Half a Canyon": Malkmus told Rolling Stone he was "acting like Damo Suzuki at the end of the song," pushing an unrepeated, blown-out scream so extreme he "thought I was going to have an aneurysm." He never tried it again.
listen: upstream & here
1970
Mother SkyCan
1995
Half a CanyonPavement
listen forListen for the vocal, not the riff. Damo Suzuki's live-wire, semi-improvised wailing on a Can track like "Mother Sky" is the general model Malkmus named for his own performance; the moment to catch on "Half a Canyon" is the extended, blown-out scream closing the song over a burnt-out guitar tone — the same all-or-nothing vocal abandon, saved for the very end.
The Velvet Underground1960s · Art rock / Proto-punk / Experimental rock
Malkmus has never hedged on this one. Naming "Sister Ray" as "the ultimate song... the ultimate noise statement of all time," he told the Observer that the band was inseparable from his own New York years: "Lou Reed was so important in every way... The Velvet Underground, Lou Reed; they're New York to me." He wrote much of Pavement's catalogue while living in that city, 1991 to 1997.
listen: upstream & heresource: GQ — Greatest. Indie-est. Band. Ever. (Can, the Clean, and the Velvet Underground as "source material") ↗
1968
Sister RayThe Velvet Underground
1995
Fight This GenerationPavement
listen forPair "Sister Ray" with "Fight This Generation," Pavement's longest, most chaotic recording: both let one riff grind on past any pop structure, guitars fraying into feedback and noise rather than resolving into a chorus. It's the audible cousin of the reverence Malkmus described elsewhere — a song stretched past the point of behaving, until it stops sounding like a song at all.