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Rating: (A Wowee Zowee Psychedelic Review by LestoBANG)
The 50 kaleidoscopic polychromies of this new edition of Wowee Zowee from 2006, the masterpiece album by Pavement, scatter in a thousand streams. This edition is called 'Sordid Sentinels' where the sounds get drowsy in Pindaric slurs of sonic smoke columns, concentric and dissolute like fragile dandelions in late spring.
Songs drunk with dissonant and detuned notes that mutually oscillate on the staff, barely upheld by the frail, ethylic, and perpetually off-phase voice of Stephen Malkmus in an evident state of confusion, as if possessed by ecstatic and stuttering visions, weaving stories from dissociated, misaligned, and slippery worlds like inside soap bubbles inconsistent and ethereal like snowflakes on a Ferragosto palm.
The ears wander through sweet lullabies like Black Out or Brinx Job, passing through the hallucinatory trips of Motion Suggests Itself, all the way down to the lopsided, hobbling ballads without crutches of Extradiction with 4/5 changes of tempo, air, and mood in just over 2 minutes of song. We are in the balm of a possible Slumberland evoked and reinvented from scratch, an autarchic and nihilistic Wonderland, without reservations or mitigations but where everything is possible and where the strong psychedelic component keeps jumping across the gap in broad strides in Pindaric flights worthy of the best trapeze artist of the 7 notes in perpetual balance between sky and abyss.
Nothing is aligned, nothing follows easy catch rails and you never know in what direction the passing train will go: you jump on at the first slowdown, and when you think you are in a "beat" wagon of raw 60s reminiscences (Grave Architecture) you find yourself traveling on a dazed, handleless and brakeless rock pendolino. Even in the testosterone-sparkling episodes like AT & T, the phrasing sounds distorted, out of time, as if in constant recovery, and the semi-punkish digressions of Fliux=Rad serve little purpose, almost "linear" in their desire to embody themselves dirty, ugly, and bad as mama made them. But they last just over 90 seconds, small lashes trying to straighten up the shack that refuses to travel on a linear track towards precise destinations.
The style is unmistakable and the personality is no less. Even in the most traditional ballads there’s a sort of underlying intoxication that formally taints everything and makes everything sound as if filtered through a funnel smeared with red Colli Euganei must: never completely sober, never in a clear and linear consequential direction... everything perpetually drugged and ethylically misaligned in an ongoing rush to plug the holes of songs that spurt notes from all sides. A sieve of music and emotions that find in this apparent disharmony the reins of a purebred never completely tamed and moving lazily, dodging every convention or rule of good listening normally accepted by most.
29 horses running wild (some only a few seconds long) in the first CD, that shoot sparks of genius and madness at various degrees of psychic and physical involvement (hear the daring aphonic and truly brutal blues of Brink Of The Clouds sung by a Malkmus absolutely Party of You). 21 songs in the second cd included in this edition made of out-takes, B-sides, the rare "Pacific Trim" EP, and various snippets (2 live sessions, 4 unreleased tracks, and another 4 improvised jam sessions at JJJ Radio Australia). An absolutely unique and recognizable reality in its madness that owes a lot (or better said owed, given the premature end!) to the never mourned Frank Zappa of past times and here embodies his irreverent and transgressive spirit where the notes intertwine, play, chase each other in an incredible and carefree disuniformity never tired and never satisfied with anything. The expressive circus of memories is completed with a small booklet of unseen group photos, alternative covers never published, and live photos from radio and studio sessions.
The only flaw (if we want to call it that) is perhaps the excessive length of a double album that does not allow distractions or listening with the left ear. Here, PRESENCE, participation, and sharing are required. The risk is staying out of it and being knocked down and annihilated by the 50-plus "experiences" as mighty as boulders, fragile as pink herons of Mogadishu, agile as Nebraska ibexes, and chameleonically unpredictable as the flying hares with webbed fingers from lower Mongolia, those on the border of Bhutan.
Granted that such beasts even exist, but after a full listening of such a double album, anyone is authorized to believe anything. But also its opposite.
Have a nice trip! :-)))
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