Converge and Pavement reemerge in new CDs

You Fail Me, Converge [Epitaph]
What can I possibly say about Boston’s hardcore luminaries, Converge, and their new album You Fail Me? They’ve been playing together for 13 years, far past the point that most bands spark of originality is worn out, and they’re following up a masterpiece of an album, 2001’s psychotically brilliant Jane Doe. Despite this, they have managed to put out an amazing record, full of some of the most brilliantly despondent songwriting heavy music has ever seen, and have pushed the limits of what previously defined the metalcore genre.

You Fail Me is, lyrically and thematically, an extension of Jane Doe. While Jane Doe focuses on the hurt and anger that comes with the loss of a relationship, You Fail Me explores the bitterness and loathing following the initial anger. The musical structure of this album is more straightforward, focusing more on song structure and writing as opposed to pure aggression, and the distortion introduced in Jane Doe has been ramped down. Lyrics like “with engine heart/ and boiled blood/ I will push on down/ my wounded roads” poetically showcase lyricist Jacob Bannon’s pain, especially enhanced by the banshee-esque howl with which Bannon delivers the lyrics.

Musically, You Fail Me varies the traditional formula of metalcore while still managing to create chaotically beautiful songs. Tracks like “Drop Out” and “Eagles Become Vultures” are relatively straight forward songs fusing elements of punk and grind to create the most aggressive tracks on the album. On “Hanging Moon,” drummer Ben Koller begins with a furious blast before evolving into something totally unexpected. Bannon hollers over Kurt Ballou’s insanely heavy guitar riffing while the drums go on in what is basically a standard, uncomplicated rock beat in 4:4 time.

However, the tracks “You Fail Me” and “In Her Shadow” which, clocking in at roughly twelve minutes, are the true emotional centerpiece of the album. The title track finds Bannon’s shrieks of “you fail me with your new dead-end dream/you fail me with your pill box fantasy” thickly layered over the methodic wail of Ballou’s guitar. “In Her Shadow,” a glacially slow track that may best define the themes of the album, finds an acoustic guitar droning over Bannon’s painful chants of lyrics like “so she boarded their sinking ship/and crossed their needle red sea.” These two songs form the core of You Fail Me, showcasing the sheer despondence in which Bannon finds himself.

It is tough to call You Fail Me anything other than the best heavy album since, well, Jane Doe. This is the soundtrack to the worst day of your life, a challenging, nuanced work of art that uses all of a person’s depression and sorrow found in life’s worst moments to create an album that is simply amazing, a sonic landscape of utter despair.
—Reese Isaacson, Guest Writer

Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain: L.A.’s Desert Origins, Pavement [Matador Records]
I wish I had been a more conscious eight-or-nine year old in the early ’90s, because then I could have caught onto Pavement. Luckily, the band excels in reissuing their material, appeasing those late-blooming indie rock fans born ten years too late. And so it is that we have Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain: L.A.’s Desert Origins, a massively expanded, two-disc reissue of Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, the master follow-up to Pavement’s unplanned slacker classic, 1992’s Slanted & Enchanted.

Crooked Rain was Pavement’s grand opening as a bonafide band. Having fired their Slanted drummer because he was too drunk to hold up in practice, the band was out to prove their sound in the swirling, hyped ’90s rock scene. They would not simply be graduate slackers who could hammer out a garage masterpiece so good it’s instructional, but rather a cohesive, sure group of guys who could transfer the success of Slanted into a sound more refined; but just as hazy.

Pavement was in a windowless 8th floor studio in Midtown Manhattan recording Crooked Rain for August and September of 1993. Living downtown and in Brooklyn, the band—Californians mostly—were then New Yorkers, and Crooked Rain reflects their identity. It has the sunny, suburban California sound, but it’s gritty and cool enough to hear out of a downtown bar. “Walking down Broadway every day to the studio to drinking every night in the East Village had to seep into the record somehow,” guitarist Spiral Stairs reflects in the reissue’s accompanying 64-page booklet. And still, as it said so much about the ho-hum of American life, suburban or urban, Crooked Rain could translate anywhere. “Range Life” says it all: “Out on my skateboard the night is just hummin’/And the gum smacks are the pulse I’ll follow if my Walkman fades/But I’ve got absolutely no one, no one but myself to blame.”

Crooked Rain’s 12 tracks are crafted, pure indie rock, from the rush of Stephen Malkmus’s broken, inimitable voice in the opener “Silence Kit” to the royal closing of “Fillmore Jive,” when SM sings out those lines of album-ending perfection: “Good night to the rock and roll era/ Cause they don’t need you anymore.” The added 37 tracks of L.A.’s Desert Origins are like footnotes to the original album.

Listening to the second disc sessions with original drummer Gary Young (the one they later fired for being too drunk), one can hear how Pavement cradled their slipshod skills of the early ’90s, while adding just enough pop and melody to sharpen the lines, but still leave it uneven. They resisted fame, refusing to talk with Rolling Stone because they didn’t like how the magazine had covered the ‘80s. And in their anti-image that was more bored, employed college grads than connected, on-the-rise hipsters, Pavement showed what so many bands today forget: that it’s the music, stupid, not the clothes.

Specifically, the track list of the reissue is, to reference “Gold Soundz,” “nothing I don't like.” The first disc contains the original 12 tracks of the 1994 release, plus a line of B-sides from various singles and compilations until 1995. The real gold, though, is found in the second disc. All 25 tracks are previously unreleased, from the first eight tracks that are the original Stockton, CA sessions with Young, to tracks nine through 21–outtakes from the New York City sessions that resulted in Crooked Rain–to the final four tracks from a BBC radio session with famed, and recently decease,d recording legend John Peel.

The second disc’s opening track, “All My Friends,” is vintage ’93 Pavement, and could have fit on the original recording. It has the signature ease and pomp, while Malkmus’s shriek matches the sharp, biting, high guitar parts so well it should be featured at rock band camp. Young-on-drums versions of “Range Life” and “Elevate Me Later” (called “Ell Ess Two” here) are certainly a bit flatter than the Steve West-supported album cuts, but in their casualness they show Pavement at their shoddy best. “Same Way of Saying” makes you remember that Malkmus is a longtime friend and band mate of David Berman of the Silver Jews, and so with a simple guitar rhythm and some acerbic but accurate lyrics, he can sing a hell of a song. What’s more, on this recording, between verses, Malkmus mumbles to whoever is next to him, “I kind of feel like Hüsker Dü on this one.”

The reasons for wanting rarities and outtakes are many. Pavement recognizes the appeal, and ten years after their initial successes, they continue to elevate themselves.
—Freddy Deknatel, Assistant A&E Editor