Grooved Pavement

Since the release of its debut album, Slanted and Enchanted, in 1992, Pavement has been held up as an avatar of all manner of socio-musicological movements-slackerism, lo-fi, anti-grunge, neo-garage. But, to tell the truth, Pavement occupies a homely universe quite apart from any youth culture. After seven years and five albums, Stephen Malkmus, the band's lead singerguitarist, says simply, "We've got a good Protestant work ethic. We've had our influences, but now they're more hidden.... We just sound like Pavement." The role of blase underground antihero rather suits Malkmus, who founded the band in 1989 with guitarist Scott Kannberg, a childhood friend from their hometown of Stockton, California. A lanky, bookish sort, Malkmus looks and acts more like a grad student than a rock star. While his alternative-nation peers croon about suburban disaffection and suicidal longing, Malkmus waxes obliquely about summer flings and shady lanes, lifts lyrics from John Ashbery poems, and is not afraid to flex his sardonic side. "It's good that there are wordy people that are still into rock," says percussionist-Moog technician Bob Nastanovich. "We are kind of dependent upon them." For a band so unassuming, Pavement has attracted a surprising degree of reverence. Its underproduced, distorted-but-kind-of-pretty sound has elicited awe from some of the brighter lights of the alternative scene, who have willfully tried to pare down and master Pavement's bare-bones formula. Ironically, this is a sound Pavement is moving away from. For its sixth album, Terror Twilight, which comes out this month, Pavement enlisted the services of an outside producer for the first time (Nigel Godrich of Beck and Radiohead fame), and the result is the most polished and accessible Pavement record to date. "It's an experiment for us to be working with a producer," says Malkmus. "We wanted to see if we sound good big. But that doesn't mean that the next album is going to sound like Whitney Houston."

JOHN GILLIES