Remains of the day

Bi-coastal lo-fi pioneers’ troubled 1999 swan song, belatedly improved by the deluxe reissue treatment. By Stevie Chick.

Pavement ★★★★ Terror Twilight: Farewell Horizontal MATADOR. CD/DL/LP

THAT TERROR Twilight: Farewell Horizontal arrives a full 14 years after the previous entry in Pavement’s supposedly biennial reissues series is notable. The group’s percussionist/Moogwrangler/wildcard Bob Nastanovich tells MOJO the delay was principally due to a paucity of bonus material. But then he admits, “Terror Twilight was our most poorly received album.” Helmed by Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, the recording sessions took the group outside of their comfort zone. With an eye to making a Pavement album that might speak to a broader audience, Godrich expected these notoriously lackadaisical musicians to knuckle down and toil, as frontman Stephen Malkmus began to wonder if he’d outgrown his bandmates.

You can forgive their reluctance to revisit the experience, then. But, following a winter spent poring over The Beatles: Get Back and forensically divining the exact causes of the Fab Four’s split, Farewell

Horizontal’s frank linernotes and copious outtakes provoke similar sleuthy hypotheticals. Did the laborious recording process cause Pavement’s dissolution? Or was Malkmus already drifting apart from his bandmates? And did the absence of any songs by guitarist/ vocalist Scott ‘Spiral Stairs’ Kannberg signal Malkmus’s desire to take control of the group, or a group dynamic in fatal free fall?

Work on Terror Twilight began in July 1998 with a fortnight at Jackpot! Recording Studios in Portland, Oregon. Lance Bangs’ Pavement rockumentary Slow Century depicted the band drunkenly air-guitaring along to Dinosaur Jr’s You’re Living All Over

Me in Portland, but this bonhomie was short lived. Malkmus arrived with demos of new songs, backed by guitar and weird antique synth, but soon discovered he was the only member with new songs.

“Terror Twilight was the most ‘start from scratch’ album Pavement made,” explains Nastanovich to MOJO. “We didn’t live anywhere near each other, so there was no organic communal song-writing going on. And that was the most frustrating aspect of Pavement for Stephen: to be in a band with four people who, when the party was over and everybody went home, pretty much forgot about Pavement. He was the only one doing the homework.”

The sessions at Jackpot! went nowhere. On their final day in Portland, the group decamped to the home of a friend, Rex Ritter of post-rockers Jessamine, where Malkmus taught the band a song of his “so easy all of you should be able to play it”. The opening couplet of Ann Don’t Cry feels like a message from songwriter to bandmates: “The damage has been done/I am not having fun any more.”

Amid these strained vibes materialised

Godrich. A fan, he nevertheless believed Pavement “too left-field for some people”. His mission to finetune their chaos began at Sonic Youth’s Echo Canyon studio, a rustic spot within the shadow of the World Trade Centre, where the sound of Wall Street bankers jamming with their hobby bands next door bled through. At Godrich’s insistence, Pavement relocated to RPM, a plusher studio nearby, cutting the LP there over 10 expensive days, before adding finishing touches (including some gutbucket harmonica from Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood on Platform Blues and Billie) at RAK studios in London.

Godrich’s approach was radically different from the easy-going producers Pavement had previously worked with – Mitch Easter, Bryce Goggin and Doug Easley – who, Nastanovich says, “invited you into their place and made you comfortable so you could make the best record possible.” Godrich, by contrast, worked them hard, demanding numerous retakes (Malkmus and Kannberg both complained of blisters on their fingers), overdubbing to correct mistakes, and even getting Malkmus and The High Llamas’ Dominic Murcott to re-record Steve West’s imperfect drum parts. Godrich himself remarks in the sleevenotes that when he listens to Terror Twilight now, “I can hear all the work we did with Stephen’s vocals, to make him sound less like he didn’t give a shit”.

Such perfectionism was profoundly counter to the oblique, apathetic glory that had been Pavement’s trademark. But Malkmus was ambitious, ready to shake up his paradigm. His tastes had shifted from post-punk clatter to prog-folk complexity; his blueprint for Terror Twilight imagined four mellow songs, four classic Pavement-style “pop” songs, and “four hard-rock tunes, like The Groundhogs and Captain Beefheart”. This latter flavour is where Terror Twilight shines brightest: the mangled crossfirehurricanes of Platform Blues, the tectonic shifts of Cream Of Gold, the giddy din of Billie and the doomy The Hexx all offering their own idiosyncratic twists on big rock moves.

Godrich’s original tracklisting for the album (at the time vetoed by Kannberg, but reinstated here) foregrounds these heavier tracks, pushing singles Major Leagues, Spit On A Stranger and Carrot Rope – neither-fish-nor-fowl attempts to find middle ground between old and new-school Pavement – to the second half. This version plays to what Malkmus saw as the album’s “psychedelic, trippy” strengths. But, undeniable highlights aside and occasional longueurs considered, it doesn’t mask the fact that

Terror Twilight still doesn’t quite work.

Godrich isn’t the villain here. Neither is Malkmus. Nor are the rest of Pavement, playing to the very limits of their skills, and happening upon occasional moments of brilliance (a deep dive of the box set’s bonuses turns up further treasures like the knowing Cheap Trick vamp of Be The Hook, a gnarly live cover of Creedence’s Sinister Purpose, and the gleeful indie rock throwback of Stub Your Toe, which pairs Kannberg with maverick ex-Pavement drummer Gary Young). If Terror Twilight doesn’t hang together as a whole, it’s because Pavement were themselves growing apart, puzzle pieces that no longer fitted together. You can sense Malkmus gazing off at a future without these musicians, and you can hear the absence of a certain spark, a crucial fraternal bonhomie smothered. But still, it’s hard to disagree with Bob Nastanovich’s final verdict. “We quit while we were ahead,” he tells MOJO. “Or at least before we really became shit.”

“This version plays to the album’s ‘trippy’ strengths.”