Track Listing

1. Spit On A Stranger
2. Folk Jam
3. You Are A Light
4. Cream of Gold
5. Major Leagues
6. Platform Blues
7. Ann Don't Cry
8. Billie
9. Speak, See, Remember
10. The Hexx
11. ...and Carrot Rope

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #36280 in Music
• Released on: 1999-06-08
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: Enhanced

Album Description
5th album by this U.S. alternative act, their first to use a 24 track studio and Nigel Godrich for production (Radiohead/Beck). Matador Records.

Amazon.com's Best of 1999
Always acknowledged as sloppy, laissez-faire geniuses of the indie set, Pavement continue to refine their singles-to-noise ratio on Terror Twilight. Working with Beck and Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, the lyrics remain inscrutable, but the songs, which opened up slightly on Brighten the Corners, finally begin to reveal themselves. --Randy Silver

Amazon.com essential recording
Terror Twilight is Pavement's fifth proper studio album and perhaps their most confident effort to date. Opening with the surprisingly subdued leadoff single, the sinewy-sweet "Spit on a Stranger" (which sounds like the Velvet Underground after a couple of cartwheels), it's clear that Pavement is in no hurry to re-create Slanted and Enchanted's fractured and raw indie-pop. Instead of short bursts of jive poetry and razor guitars, the band opts for slightly longer songs with more subdued sonic explorations. Still, Terror Twilight never quite veers off into predictable directions; the boys' talent continues to confound expectations. Unforeseenly unironic heartstrings seem to be the thing these days for Pavement. This album boasts their finest ballads to date--"Major Leagues" and "Stranger"--but the days of fiery songs like "No Life for Ginger" may be over. Malkmus and crew seem to be heading in the same avant-pop direction as Built to Spill. But while Pavement may be more laid-back, they're still standing firm. Terror Twilight could be the bedrock upon which they build the rest of their career. --Jason Josephes

Customer Reviews

If it wasn't any good, why can't I stop listening to it?
Is it just me, or is this a REALLY dark album? "Spit on a Stranger" is a wonderful yet melancholy pop song. "Major Leagues" is twangy and sad. "The Hexx" strikes fear into my heart. And my favorite track, "Ann Don't Cry," is the definition of elegiac.

I understand all the criticisms of this album--overproduced, irrelevant compared to "Slanted and Enchanted" or "Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain", somewhat dull, almost a Steve Malkmus solo project. I didn't really like it, either, the first time I heard it, and only liked it a bit more the next twenty times I played it--until I suddenly realized I kept playing it. Over and Over. Like standing in the Louvre, staring at the Mona Lisa for hours, caught up in the enigma.

"Terror Twilight"--Never has an album been so appropriately monikered. Just like they've always done, Pavement makes concept albums about California without calling them concept albums about California. This one is all about what happens when you're in your early 30s, bored and listless, trying to recapture the enthusiasm of your early 20s (i.e., "S&E"). Instead of skateboarding home from your job at the cafe, now you're driving a Lexus, stuck in rush hour traffic, coming back from your cubicle job at some software company. I don't think I'm wrong about this.

Greatest band of the '90s
I have been listening to rock for over 35 years. Through the decades, certain ablums have been special to me (The Velvet Underground and Nico, Patti Smith's Horses, The Replacements' Tim). For the past decade, though, nothing has really grabbed me like that. Oh, I liked Nevermind and Exile in Guyville as much as the next guy, but somehow nothing seemed to have that special spark.

Until I discovered Pavement. I was somewhat at a loss as to where to place this review. I love all five of their official albums, and I think that Slanted and Enchanted is probably still their best. Still, Terror Twilight has grown on me to the point that the hooks, melodies, and lyrics have become indelible.

Since I'm a middle-aged guy, my opinion may not mean much to Pavement's basic audience (or what I imagine is their audience). But from the point of view of a guy who has heard it all (or at least a lot of it), entered college when Purple Haze was in the Top 40, and been listening ever since, take it from me: Pavement can stand with the best of them!

Between Balance and Vertigo
Good music becomes great music when the aesthetic experience can live on its own resources without an analysis of its existential point. Pavement shows us on this album that life exists somewhere in between balance - the quality of feeling "right with the world", and vertigo - the apprehension that things are about to fall apart. Somehow this album rests transparently in this tension, and makes us feel comfortable that we can live there.

There are some things in this world that we will never understand. This can be for multiple reasons - from sheer complexity, to epistemic ignorance, to the encroachment upon a flashing insight to which we cannot fully comprehend. Steven Malkmus exists somewhere around these categories; perhaps even severing the boundaries between them in some odd karmic dance that incarnates him as a prophet or a devil. But none of this existential rambling really matters at all. The brillinace of Pavement is in helping us realize this for the purpose of just enjoying the music.

I don't know what "children in electric dresses" are. I may never know what "bright red ropes, periscopes, they've got every thing you would ever need stored under a chair" means. Or I may never know the significance of "a fetus in a jar".

But Pavement eschews complete incoherentism with delicate subtlety. "Cream of Gold" begins with the lyrics, "So much for destiny...Time is a one way track and I am not coming back/I dream in biege/Why'd you lead me so far now?" Here we hearken to an unusual sense of personalism and we seem to find a balance - a balance that is kept tentative by the signature rough and unpolished nature of the band itself. This is not a drug trip, nor is it the vacuous droning of innuermerable bands who wish they had something to be angry about. It is not a plastic version of chaos that punctures our ears, or the gossamer anti-melodies of over-produced celebrities acting as stand ins for true passion. It is more like someone waking us up to help us heal from the night before when we drank a little too much - a good friend who knows from experience that coffee and nicotene do not help a hangover.

So we awake from our painful sleep that never seems to extinguish the desire for more, hit play on the stereo, and gently tune into spontaneous cohesison that emerges out of the usual chaotic blend of cacophonous overtures and fragmented words. On some deeper, intuitive level, it all makes sense. So sit down, have a cold one, and realize that over-analyzing can drown out a good thing with the interrupting voices of our own thoughts. But perhaps I have overstated the issue... Give it a listen. This review may be pointless after all.