Marble Valley
Super Sober (Indiekator / Sea)
As the saying might have it, “you can take the boy out of Pavement, but you can’t take the Pavement out of the boy”. So, while Steve West may have been only the drummer in the US indie legends, there’s a decidedly familiar feel to this album.
That’s not to say that they offer a predictable set of cloned Pavement tunes. Far form it, in fact. West’s ‘project’ has many elements that differ from his day job. Take opener ‘Artificial Pistols’ - while it has the searing guitar work that might have graced Slanted and Enchanted, the whole vibe is a gritty, bluesey vibe, that doesn’t sound a bit like he Fall.
And ‘Parlez Vouz’, which follows it, might have a Malkmussy (is that adjective in the alt.rock dictionary?) nasal drawl - or it’s maybe just the American drawl - but the lightly-strummed guitar and the hummed backing vocals are pretty far-removed from what the cynics might have expected.
There’s more - ‘Bing Bang Bong - “this is how I tune my drums” lasts ten seconds and we presume is West exorcising the albatross of being “just the drummer”, though he lays down a mighty beat on the album’s title track.
Closing this mini-album is ‘Honeysuckle Maritime’, which does sound a bit like the Fall. However, it also sounds a bit like Pink Floyd , and while again it’s not what we were expecting, it’s presumably something that Messrs Kannburg, Malkmus and al would approve of.
Donald Bush
