There are so many good Malkmus songs that it's hard to pick a favorite, but this song is particularly interesting to me because of how the lyric and feeling of this song is so straight-forwardly obscure.
Pavement got compared to R.E.M. a lot and while that is fair it is also a cop out. In fact Pavement probably had more in common with obscure, British, margin-rockers The Fall, Pulp (pre-Brit Pop), or The Wedding Present.
"Here" does remind me a bit of R.E.M.'s "South Central Rain" in feeling. Certain phrases are direct:
I was dressed for success /But success it never comes /And I'm the only one who laughs
At your jokes when they are so bad /And your jokes are always bad /But they're not as bad as this ...Come join us in a prayer We'll be waiting, waiting where
Everything's ending here
Those are just great,sad, slightly unsettling lyrics. The music is also fascinating in this song as it sounds like a preview of England in the late 90's early 2000's (Coldplay, Radiohead, Travis, Sterophonics, etc.)
Pavement is both an easy band to get into and a hard band to fully appreciate. I think this song is a good metaphor for that opinion.
0 comments:
Post a Comment