Ex Post Facto: Albums That Your Guidance Counselor Listened to While Smoking Dope
By Liz Rodriguez
Managing Editor

Pavement
Brighten the Corners
Matador
1997

Brighten the Corners, while generally regarded as inferior to other Pavement efforts, is probably their most polished, assured album ever. The Hipster Thought-Police will burn this article if I don't give at least cursory mention to Slanted and Enchanted, but I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that Slanted and Enchanted doesn't compare to Brighten the Corners; it is not a question of which album is "better," BTC is simply in a different league than other Pavement albums. While it's not the type of album you fall in love with on the first listen, it slowly grows on you until you recognize its unparalleled wit and lushness. Stephen Malkmus (SM) and the lads come out throwing hydrogen bombs, and they don't let up until our ears are a vast nuclear wasteland of nonsense lyrics and crunchy guitars.

The album opener "Stereo" is trademark Pavement: SM speaking rather than singing, the superfluous band member jumping in with a random phrase, and the build-up to the shouting chorus of "Hey, listen to me, I'm on the stereo / My baby baby baby baby baby gave me, malaria, hysteria."

The Beatles-esque "Shady Lane" is a change for the band: think SM is goofily singing about how everybody needs a shady lane (think pastoral cliché)? Nope. You listen again, and he's singing, "a redder shade of neck on a whiter shade of trash/and this emory board is giving me a rash." In the next line, he sings to this girl, "you're so beautiful to look at when you cry," but suddenly pulls back on her, "freeze don't move/you've been chosen as an extra in the movie adaptation of the sequel to your life." This is a love song, Pavement-style: weird, oblique, yet uniquely brilliant.

The album's strength is partly a result of the track order. "Embassy Row," the most overtly political song on the album starts off with a sing-song chorus, then launches into an attack on the hypocrisy of foreign ambassadors, "I need to get born / I need to get dead / I'm sick of the forms / I'm sick of being misread / By men in dashikis / And their leftist weeklies / Colonised wrath-their shining new paths," before ending in angry shrieks. Then Malkmus and Co. get smooth and post-coital with the following track, "Blue Hawaiian." With lyrics such as "Put the bark in the dog and you've got a guardian / When the capital's 'S', it is followed by a 'T'-and it's probably me," nobody knows for sure what SM's singing about here, but he sure sounds damn sexy doing it.

SM's rare sincerity make this album unique. On BTC, Malkmus experiments with falsettos and with-gasp-singing earnestly, such as in "Transport is Arranged." Although the lyrics may seem as cryptic as ever, the confessional tone in which he sings, "You better learn how to run, you better learn how to run / You better walk away and leave the angles for the shills / Well, I've been thinking for days about the means and the way that I could hate all I touch," followed by guitar riffs most bands would kill for, is strangely touching in its self-admission and is a warning that SM isn't the kind of a guy you should try and figure out.

This is frequently referred to as Pavement's domestic album because most of the band members got married around this time-but SM remains a perennial bachelor. Brighten the Corners isn't so much domestic, however, as it is a collection of love songs; but this isn't the type of love you see in a Freddie Prinze, Jr. movie. No, this is more in the vein of Tarantino's True Romance: weird and unusual, but ultimately beautiful. Even without the clever lyrics, the melodies are lush and the guitars wonderfully noisy. Brighten the Corners may not be Pavement's best album overall, but it's a perfect culmination of their brilliant career up to that point.