Pavement's Pavements is the most Pavement film Pavement could have made
Pavement!
Pavement’s new, wilfully meta biopic probably wouldn’t have been made without the pandemic. Six month’s before lockdown set in, the band’s frontman, Stephen Malkmus, came on the Loud And Quiet podcast Midnight Chats, primarily to discuss his solo album Groove Denied. But a Pavement reunion had also been announced to take place in June 2020, at Primavera Sound festivals in Barcelona and Porto. “Two shows, that’s all,” said Malkmus when asked if there’d be any more. “Two shows, that’s all… because that’s just… weird. So we’re gonna do that.” It sounded about right considering how Pavement operated between 1989 and 1999 (in constant low level self-sabotage mode) and it’s not as if the band’s 2010 reunion tour had ended as a love-in.
Listen back to that interview now and it doesn’t sound like Malkmus is holding anything back, but the pandemic delayed Primavera and those two shows by two years, which was plenty of time for things to change. European and North American tours were booked, and indie filmmaker Alex Ross Perry dreamt up the ambitious ‘docu-fiction’ Pavements – just about the only type of movie you can imagine the band signing off on, on account of its irreverence, low-key hilarity and film grad flair. They probably also thought, it’s not like this guy’s going to be able to deliver on this pitch anyway. It’s to all our benefits that he did: Pavements is 90 minutes of nostalgia flipped on its head, that’s as uniquely creative as it is wry, leading to a place of such joyful goodwill I couldn’t go straight to bed after watching it.