Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Go back to those Gold Soundz.., 3 Feb 2005
All of a sudden i'm 17 again, sitting in my bedroom trying to work out the chords to "Range Life".. A phenomenal reissue - even if you already own this underrated masterpiece it's still worth forking out the price of an album for the whopping 49 tracks and cool little booklet you get here. laid back, raw, sunkissed, lyrically bizarre, melodic genius. Unmissable.
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Life changing music, 27 May 2005
When I first heard this album I was an adolescent teenager with bad floppy hair and a Dinosaur Jnr fixation. Years later, long after all my Dinosaur Jnr albums have gone to the storage graveyard in the loft, I'm still listening to Pavement. For me Brighten the Corners is their best album, but Crooked Rain still rates as a life changer. Musically it took me down a different road, away from the antipathic, introverted angst of Nirvarna, or Smashing Pumpkins into a whole new world of playful melodys, lyrics and sharp, sharp humour.
Before Pavement I always belived music had to be serious.
It even turned me into the musician I am today. Search out '53mph' on Amazon and you can find my CD. It would never have existed without this album.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Origins, 18 Jan 2006
First there was "Slanted and Enchanted: Luxe and Reduxe," a richly enhanced double-disc set with a fat liner book of notes. Now there's "Crooked Rain Crooked Rain: L.A.'s Desert Origins," a similar reissue of Pavement's magnificent sophomore album -- and crammed with so much new stuff that it's worth getting again.
The first half of the first disc is the original "Crooked Rain Crooked Rain": the caustic pop-rock of "Cut Your Hair," the dark "Stop Breathin'," the folky "Range Life," and the trippy "Newark Wilder." It's immensely, intensely good, with a cleaner sound than the lo-fi "Slanted and Enchanted," and a sort of suburban-kid-turned-rocker perspective.
But wait: there's much more. Almost forty songs more, to be precise! Packed into every crevice of the disc is B-sides, singles, and other free-floating music from Pavement's "Crooked" days. One example is "Cooling By Sound," a sardonically wicked song that informs you that Malkmus is cooler than thou. Another is the quiet B-side "Strings of Nashville."
Then there is the second disc: eleven unreleased songs accompanied by a bunch of other tracks. These extras are not all good, but they are always enlightening, especially the eight that were made with Gary Young. There are even some rough early songs which Pavement was messing around with at the time, and were later rerecorded for "Wowee Zowee." Rounding it off are a bunch of other early creations -- some funnier songs, some instrumental experiments -- and a session with the much-lamented DJ John Peel. And accompanying the CDs is a fat little booklet, full of retrospectives and glossy pics.
"Crooked Rain Crooked Rain" was recorded in an apartment over a record store, which seems like an appropriate place for an indie-rock album to be born. Especially for one of the best underground bands of that era, whose catchy, weird pop-rock has remained relevant and enjoyable right up to this day. It seems only right that this sprawling reissue is just so... big. Never can it be said that Matador didn't do justice to Pavement in these reissues.
Malkmus and the other Pavement guys had plenty of talent -- they could be fun and catchy, gritty and lo-fi, or dark and weird. And while "Slanted And Enchanted: Luxe and Reduxe" was a look at the birth of the band, this is more of a how-to-make-an-album portrait. Not bad, just different. A good kind of different.
The Peel Sessions are among the best of the extras on this release. The B-sides and "rough drafts" are not as polished as the final product; sometimes the songs like "Range Life" and "Ell Ess Two" (an early "Elevate Me Later") were entirely different. A few of the extras are for die-hard fans only, like "Unseen Power of the Picket Fence." But cram them all together, and it feels like Pavement has released a whole new album. In a sense, despite being disbanded, they have.
"Crooked Rain Crooked Rain: L.A.'s Desert Origins" is a must-buy -- with four times the original material and formerly unreleased songs, it's an amazing release even if you already have the original.
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