Slanted & Enchanted

1	Summer Babe Winter Version 3:16
2	Trigger Cut/Wounded-Kite at :17 3:16
3	No Life Singed Her 2:09
4	In The Mouth A Desert 3:52
5	Conduit For Sale! 2:52
6	Zurich Is Stained 1:41
7	Chesley's Little Wrists 1:16
8	Loretta's Scars 2:55
9	Here 3:56
10	Two States 1:47
11	Perfume-V 2:09
12	Fame Throwa 3:22
13	Jackals, False Grails: The Lonesome Era 3:21
14	Our Singer 3:09

Barnes & Noble

Pavement's SLANTED AND ENCHANTED is the MURMUR of the '90s, a record whose clamorous guitars and hum-along hooks can provide the perfect fodder for late-night dorm-room conversations and suicide term-paper missions. Sure, the Stockton, California, quintet looked like refugees from the college soccer team, with their preppy clothes and clean cuts. But their 1992 full-length debut is the height of indie-rock -- that "underground" genre typified by its low recording costs, immediately catchy melodies, and postgrad poetry. Pavement effortlessly took the tastiest ingredients of every great guitar band to come before them (Sonic Youth, R.E.M., Dinosaur Jr., the Fall) to make music that could be blisteringly intense and sweetly gorgeous, often at the same time. Consider "Trigger Cut." When singer-guitarist Steve Malkmus nonchalantly dropped weird, dark lyrics like "lies and betrayal/fruit covered nails/electricity and lust," he tagged them to a tune so catchy the final product melted in your ears like a Valentine's Day confection. On songs like "In a Mouth a Desert," "Zurich Is Stained," and the instant classic "Summer Babe," Pavement's pop was as elegant as it was abrasive -- and, unlike many of their slacker peers, passionate too. A classic. Jon Dolan

All Music Guide

Slanted & Enchanted is a left-field classic, a record that came out of nowhere to help establish a new subgenre of rock & roll. Pavement had already sketched out their sound, as well as their amateurish lo-fi aesthetic, on a series of indie singles before recording their debut, but Slanted & Enchanted is where they pulled all of their disparate sounds together into a distinctive style. At first, the primitive sound of the record is the most gripping thing about Slanted, but soon the true innovations of the record appear through the songs themselves. Stephen Malkmus and Spiral Stairs subvert conventional pop structures, turning melodies inside out, reinterpreting and reworking older songs, and bending genres together. It's a complex, enthralling record, filled with fractured riffs, strong melodies, and cryptic melodies, and with all the hiss and static, Slanted & Enchanted sounds like listening to a distant college radio station -- melodies and hooks keep floating in and out of the mix, with individual lines instead of full lyrics surfacing through the murk. This unique song structure as much as the sound of the album itself makes Slanted & Enchanted an individual, signature work and one of the most influential records of the '90s. Stephen Thomas Erlewine