Band ‘Pavement’ finally embraces ‘Terror Twilight’
“I call them the Pavement anxiety dreams.”
Sco Kannberg, be er known as Spiral Stairs to fans of that totemic 1990s band he co-founded, is explaining what’s been happening to him in the middle of the night lately. As he prepares for a slate of reunion shows later this year, the 55-year-old guitarist has no nerves about ge ing onstage with his former bandmates – at least during the daytime. “I wake up in a sweat,” he says.
“Everybody else is playing a song, and I look down, and I’ve got no cords plugged in.”
Kannberg laughs, though longtime followers of Pavement might be tempted to read a li le more into the dream. The band has not released any new music since 1999, when it capped its catalogue with “Terror Twilight,” a gorgeous but slightly discordant album that made a fugue of Pavement’s charmed slacker ethos and sly commercial aspirations, all with something slightly darker running underneath.
The album – reissued this week by Matador Records as “Terror Twilight: Farewell Horizontal,” a 45song package that includes demos, ou akes, a rearranged sequence, and a 30-page book of liner notes and interviews – was recorded as the band was splintering. Its members had sca ered across the country, and creative control had largely been consolidated in its frontman, Stephen Malkmus. Tension mounted during the tour that followed, and by the summer of 2000, Pavement had formally but unceremoniously dissolved. While Malkmus is famously circumspect about the meaning behind his lyrics, the opening lines of “Ann Don’t Cry” – “The damage has been done/I am not having fun anymore” – are not exactly cryptic.
Outwardly, things were good when the “Twilight” sessions got underway. By 1998, Pavement had become one of the most critically beloved bands of its era, if a slightly prismatic one: The most interesting parsings of their work grapple with the question of whether the apparent disinterest in, well, everything was a sincere worldview or a pose that was meant to be read as such. They’d released their sprawling, idiosyncratic opus (1995’s “Wowee Zowee”) and followed it two years later with “Brighten the Corners,” which was tight and polished by comparison, though not so tight or polished as to alienate the counterculture.
But they were not exactly huddling in a bunker somewhere to plot their next move. Kannberg got married and moved to Berkeley, Calif. Drummer Steve West was living in New York and bassist Mark Ibold in Virginia; Bob Nastanovich, the band’s multi-instrumentalist and resident horse-racing fanatic, bought what he describes as “an 800-foot shotgun shack” across the street from Churchill Downs in Louisville. In fact, not all the members were even sure if they’d a empt to follow “Corners.”
“You made an album, you toured, you disbanded,” West says of the band’s normal rhythm, “and you were pleasantly surprised if you got a call” to start a round of sessions for the next one.
That call did eventually come.
In July 1998, Malkmus summoned his bandmates to Portland, Ore., where he now lived. Despite the professional uncertainty West and other members describe, each Pavement record grew, at least on a creative level, out of the tour that preceded it. Each record, that is, until “Terror Twilight.” This was the first time the band had none of what Nastanovich calls “larval-stage” songs, skeletons that were kicked around during rehearsals and sound checks until they were ready for flesh and blood and mastering. Instead, Kannberg, West, Ibold and Nastanovich tried to get up to speed as quickly as possible on songs that Malkmus had demoed alone, some of which he’d debuted at acoustic shows in Portland earlier that year.
The stint in Portland was necessary to get the members back in sync. “It was probably the closest time that Pavement ever had to what most bands have,” Nastanovich says, “in that all of its members were residing in the same place and practicing on a regular schedule.” — The Washington Post