{"id":41087,"date":"2008-09-08T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-09-08T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/slanted-and-enchanted-2\/"},"modified":"2008-09-08T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2008-09-08T00:00:00","slug":"slanted-and-enchanted-2","status":"publish","type":"review","link":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/slanted-and-enchanted-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Slanted And Enchanted"},"content":{"rendered":"

You can’t judge a book by its cover. Surprisingly often, though, you can judge an album by its title.<\/o:p><\/p>\n

Led Zeppelin IV<\/i>. Does it get more concise than that?\u00a0 It tells the casual browser everything they need to know: it’s Led Zeppelin. It’s the fourth time they’ve gotten up to their Zeppelish hijinks.\u00a0 Page will be stellar. Bonham will be spectacular. Robert Plant’s pants will be alarmingly tight. Fin!<\/o:p><\/p>\n

Likewise, Pavement’s Slanted And Enchanted<\/i> summarizes their debut better than any adjective-slathered review (including this one). It’s ironic, given that Pavement isn’t the most “accessible” star in the mid-\u201890s alt-rock constellation. Kurt Cobain was disaffected and tormented by drugs.\u00a0 Eddie Vedder was disaffected and hated his daddy. Stephen Malkmus? Maybe he wants to return to his home planet. Maybe he wants a chicken pot pie. His lyrics certainly don’t give any hints. They’re sometimes sinister, sometimes bubbly, always obscure. Make that “outrageously obscure.\u201d It’s the kind of entertaining gibberish you’d get if you injected Salvador Dali with sodium pentathol and shoved him into a mosh pit. Slanted? You bet your plaid flannel. And it’s not just the verbiage that’s skewed. While \u201clo-fi\u201d and \u201cslacker rock\u201d describe aspects of this disc\u2019s sound sound, labels invariably miss the big picture. In this case, the big picture’s a fever-dreamy chimera. S&E<\/i> smushes together fuzzed-out \u201860s rock, explosive proto-punk, and the charm-bracelet jangle of well-done pop, often within the space of a single song.<\/o:p><\/p>\n

That, my friends, is the enchanted. It’s why S&E<\/i> became a niche classic while its contemporaries went to the big Sam Goody<\/a> clearance bin in the sky. Its mishmash of influences ought to sound overly-cute or awkward, \u00a0but it doesn’t. Like a Portuguese Man o’ War, it’s an eclectic array of elements, improbably fused.\u00a0 The result? A mystifying creature with brains, beauty, and a wicked sting.<\/o:p><\/p>\n

Here’s the deal: defining S&E<\/i> by its irregular arrangements and inscrutable lyrics (metal scars?\u00a0 Ice deposits?\u00a0 Leather thighs?!) does it a disservice. Experimental art is frequently something that’s appreciated instead of enjoyed. Slanted And Enchanted<\/i> is absurdly enjoyable. It’s weird, but it’s also a ton of fun. Tracks like “FameThrowa” (which features sci-fi guitars, a punked-out break, and pretty little “sha-la-las\u201d) make music geeks feel like they’re back in junior high… back when it felt like a great cassette might just change your life. Possibility burbles through this album. It’s in “Conduit For Sale<\/st1:place><\/st1:city>!”‘s swells of shrieky intensity. It’s in the distorted psychedelic tangles of “Jackals, False Grails: The Lonesome Era.” It’s only when Malkmus \u2018n\u2019 friends get conventional that the album goes flat.<\/o:p><\/p>\n

It’s a pretty meager complaint; plenty of groups can’t even get convention right. But when a disc crackles with inventiveness, more humdrum moments can be (ironically enough) almost jarring.\u00a0 “Zurich Is Stained” and “Here” are decent. They’re subtle, melodic guy-with-a-guitar tunes. On daytime public radio, they’d be right at home.\u00a0 But on Slanted<\/i>, they’re square pegs trying to fit in Rorschach blot-shaped holes. “Jackals” would’ve been a wonderful final track. It’s both epic (thanks to a swooping, swirling guitar line) and hypnotic (thanks to lyrics consisting of a single seven-word chorus). “Jackals” soars. The actual closer? The mumbly, lo-fi “Our Singer.\u201d All together now: thunk. An album so chaotically creative deserves to burn out like a supernova, not a cheap forty-watt bulb.<\/o:p><\/p>\n

A few lackluster cuts aren’t enough to break Slanted And Enchanted\u2019s<\/i> spell, though. These aren’t simple songs. They’re not singalongs (“unable to bear the scandal, Ray, philanthropist \/ Rents low-down scab house in conduit” doesn’t roll off the tongue quite as easily as “Whoomp!\u00a0 There it is!.”) They’re bright, quirky, and labyrinthine. Listening to them, you might just revert to fourteen, bouncing on a twin bed, clutching a Walkman like a talisman, realizing that this — THIS — is why we listen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":28006,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[6852],"rating":[5617],"class_list":["post-41087","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-pavement","rating-rating-b-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41087","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/71"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41087"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41087\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41087"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=41087"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=41087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}