Hat tip to my friend Angela who posted this yesterday on Facebook. I’m so busy approving pages to the Fantasy Baseball Guide I can’t really think. But listening to this I’m struck by the linkages between Pavement and the Kinks.
I don’t have time to do the work for you now, but believe me, it’s soooo cool. (Dig Pavement in their Hillbilly’s phase.)
This is really terrific. I have seen Pavement a couple of times, and love them in a quirky way like the Flaming Lips. But, poppy like the Kinks as you note.
The band Pavement always reminded me of were Camper Van Beethoven, poppy but loud, bratty but poetic, crass but experimental, tight but ragged. But listening to Range Life last night I was struck that while all these things are true, they also apply to the Kinks. And where Steven Malkmus, Pavement’s songwriter and Ray Davies, the Kinks’ of course, overlap, is in these clangorous and perfectly melodic tunes about settling down, living a normal life, rejecting all the cutlure that goes along with the pop/rock life.
Paul McCartney is something of the romantic poet of the quiet life, but both Davies and Malkmus are up to something more sly. No ironic, at all, I don’t think, but not uncritical either. We are the VIllage Green Preservation Society indeed.
Great song. It was a SotW a year or so ago.
I knew you were a good fit for this Tom! Or that maybe we were a good fit for you.