Pavement's "Gold Soundz" vs. The Cure's "High"

"High" is a great, great song but should have never been the lead single for the Wish album.

I've been raised on the Cure but even I will vote for Gold Sounds - High would have indeed been better off as an album track.

Gold Soundz is my #1 summer jam for all time. That guitar break - <swoons>

Yeah, there is only one possible outcome for this.

never even heard 'high' but am voting for it

gold sounds probably wouldn't make my top 10 pavement tracks, but yeah

I like both of these. If pressed, I'd go Pavement because "Gold Soundz" is top-tier Pavement and "High" is second-tier Cure.

The trick is to imagine Robert Smith singing "You're the kinda girl I like/Cuz you're empty and you're empty too."

Impossible choice. At the time "High" seemed meh but now is totally classic.

*I'm empty

almost my first too close to call. went with 'gold soundz.' beacuse it has nice ring when you laugh.

Not a huge fan of "high" but I really hate Pavement *ducks* so "High" it is.

I really hate Pavement

think #teampavementsucks ought to have jackets/baseball caps made up

they don't look enough like midwestern date rapists as it is?

damn, enbb is totally midwestern date-rapey-looking, now you mention it

well she hasn't signed up yet has she

anyway, totally wrong to get annoyed with pavement imo, they're perfectly anodyne to all but the smashing pumpkins maybe

What for the jackets? Get on that stat, OK HM?

er x-post

done and done

Does anodyne mean irritating?

nakhchivan probably saw me posting this twelve posts ago, but:

http://www.hipsterrunoff.com/2010/03/is-pavement-a-goodinfluential-band-or-just-an-idea-that-old-alts-are-holding-on-2.html

The Pavement effect sorta reminds me of Pete & Pete, a Nickelodeon kids show that every1 claims was ‘really funny’ and that they were ‘super into’ during the 1990s. It seems impossible to believe that any1 had a critical mind back then, like we could really differentiate between TV shows.

I have good memories of me and my bf at the time mocking people dancing to "High" at this club we were at. That almost makes me want to vote for it out of sentimental value even though I don't like it at all.

pavement seem to be hated as a sort of ur-indie, the balkan dispute that you could easily ignore if it didn't lead to the passchendale of garden state

i dunno how influential they have really been, to me they seem very much of their time and temperementally quite different to the mnstrm of 00s us indie

Wish was a big downer for rabid all-black-wearing Cure obsessive c-o-t-t at 17. The single mix of "High" - espec. the xtended mix - is great. And I'm sure somewhere on ILM seven years ago Ned and I are stumping for what Wish could've been if shoegaze/wall-o-guitar wasn't of-the-moment, causing RS to second-guess the twinkling psych heard on Lost Wishes, the "High" + "Friday" flipsides, and the original version of the subsequently-spoiled "The Big Hand" as KMKMKM regression. Woulda coulda, ended up a monotonous, bleary wreck of an album.

i always wanted more cure songs to sound like "wish," actually. probably still voting for "gold soundz," even though i loved these songs pretty much equally at (roughly) the (same) time.

Wish is my favorite Cure album, after Standing on a Beach.

ha i meant "high" not "wish." christ it's too early.

It's always too early for the Cure.

if i put a cure album on right now it'd be about 10 minutes before i was having the most ennui-laden nap in history.

Having just heard this Pavement song for the first time, I think it is actually one of the worst songs I have ever heard and reminds me why I spent the vast majority of the 90s listening to techno.

never even heard 'high' but am voting for it

― i am legernd (history mayne)

This, because I have heard "Gold Soundz"

Having just heard this Pavement song for the first time, I think it is actually one of the worst songs I have ever heard

Pavement's "Gold Soundz" vs. The Cure's "Push"

I would still vote for The Cure, and not because I think "Push" is any good but because it has more in common with music that doesn't make me want to kill everyone around me until it stops playing than "Gold Soundz" does.

never really understood why pavement is cast as an Important Rock Band or as coming from the same lineage as the Fall when except for some early tracks before the first album, they basically made straight up guitar pop

i love them and all but i think they've always been miscast by pfork as being this huge cultural force when they were really just making catchy tunes which were barely sloppy enough for people to be fooled into thinking they were 'different'

i like many many pavement songs. i don't like gold soundz

Do they have songs where the singer's total and utter inability to sing makes sense and enhances the song rather than making it unlistenable shit?

As many as The Cure.

what dan is to indie vocalists the lex is to indie in general

Dan - "5-4=Unity" is the sum total of Pavement I like, primarily because it's an instrumental.

Yeah, try again Alfred. Robert Smith can actually hit discernible notes; based on this song, I'm not at all convinced that dude from Pavement can (which, you know, is fine when you're trying to do something that isn't tune-driven jangly inoffensive guitar pop, which is what this song sounds like).

I don't care about the singer's inability to hit discernible notes when the singer's fronting tune-driven jangly inoffensive guitar pop.

xp I never thought I'd live to see the day when I'd see an actually good singer repping for Robert Smith's pitch, which, like, however effective he is as a singer, <3 the Cure don't get me wrong but...I served with guys who had pitch, I knew guys who had pitch, pitch was a friend of mine. Senator Smith, you're no, etc.

tbh if you don't like malkmus's off-key yelpiness you're probably not gonna like much pavement, though it does work on some songs more than others imo

what dan is to indie vocalists the lex is to indie in general

Real world lolz

I love "Gold Soundz" but I can see where people would hate it and I was very surprised to see that pitchfork had it at number one.

btw the best pavement song is "shoot the singer", hands down

he doesn't sing any better on it though

They should have written a b-side called "We R Not in Pitch."

"Stevie Can't Sing"

"Touch Sensitive" ∞> "Gold Soundz"; probably more apropos here.

okay listening to "Gold Soundz" again and what notes is he singing in the first line in the chorus? ans: none

If you can tell me that, aero, I will concede your point; otherwise, all your doing is trying to troll because that "Hot Hot Hot!!!" clip, while not the most impressive vocal performance in the world, has MANY more instances of Robert Smith singing and sliding between actual notes than this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rj6QilYg5VA

He is singing actual notes on the first half of each line in the verse but when he goes up on the second half, he is yelping some indiscriminate pitch that isn't clear or recognizable until the last line of the first verse.

fact: the notes he's singing are awesome

well yeah - I mean - he's singing sometimes, & sorta half-assedly speak-singing the rest of the time! that's kinda what he does! some people kinda dig it! there's this other band called the fall, similar kinda deal but more angry than wistful!

All this proves is that Stephen Malkmus' talent doesn't recognize scales and pitch; he travels time and space looking for girls with equally rad hair.

Erica breaking my heart with the Pavement-hate itt

(all I'm trying to do on this & any other thread today btw is occupy my mind enough to put off the shitty day I am going to have even if it best-case-scenarios)

aero, I'm going to Key West tomorrow. Come over and use the pool.

if you handed me a piano i could pick out the melody of 'gold soundz' pretty easily and with like 99% confidence. malkmus is obviously not hitting all the notes, and that's probably just as much a stylistic thing as a way to mask his vocal inadequacies, but he's tracing the melody line well enough that i can figure out what it's 'supposed' to be using the chords/harmony as context

and it still sounds nice to me regardless of whether he's hitting notes or not

well I have many good sarcastic jokes about how my actual obligations are totally more appealing than chill times at the pool in Florida in the sweet dying end of summer instead of my actual situation i.e. feeling like I live in an Edward Albee play times a Harold Pinter one multiplied a bunch of times by a Cassavettes movie, but you get the idea

if you want to understand why pavement got (senselessly) compared to the fall, listen to "two states". other than a trace here and there in their early career, the bands have almost nothing in common and i was always bothered by the lazy association. but the the dismissal of pavement as just another trivial & indistinguishable slacker guitar pop band is off the mark. if you were american and of of a certain age/culture at the time, they nailed their moment better than anyone else going. it's about the lyrics as much as the music, which while enjoyable was hardly formally radical. and while the lyrics are tied to a specific dazed california-suburban POV, but they reach out from there to seem both universal and cryptic, clever, beautifully disengaged.

she's so lackadaisical, should've been a west coast bride
backseat on electra glide, pilots flying drive-by fades

don't hold your breath too long, this tunnel's a texas mile

cavities and yellow eyes, bleacher daisy second prize
cherry pickin fingers, my dash is locked i guess I feel fine

the way the river bends, the one who's bending over me..

it's nice. not earth-shattering, but clever, personal, evocative (ahem). and the blunted, romantic/nostalgic tone of the lyrics matches and enhances the music, paints pictures. this is what i always liked about pavement and malkmus, the sly cleverness that didn't feel the need to reveal too much, only that something was being withheld (a stance that becomes overstated and cloying "gold soundz", imo).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sT-c-Sdm9GA

above lyrics from "texas never whispers" though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WOIgI__968

^ favorite pavement.

and yeah, malkmus is not any kind of traditionally great singer, i don't have to worry about that

Watery is fairly consensus their defining release in my experience, in critico circles at any rate. And on the sly contends for stoner record of the decade. All deservedly.

w/r/t tejas never whips her:

cavities = callow teeth
daisy = dates the
dash is = dashboard's
the one who's = the woman's

imo

yeah i always heard "the way a river bends, the woman's bending over me"

not sure i could ascribe any meaning to that line either way though

shasto otm about one who's = woman

Erica breaking my heart with the Pavement-hate itt

― horseshoe, Friday, September 3, 2010 12:43 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I'm sorry, boo! I just could never get into them.

it's okay; we'll always have the pretty in pink soundtrack!

umm, try that again.

shasta otm abt one who's = woman & dash is = dashboard (i clipped the lyrics from some site, then rewrote to match my recollection)

but daisy = daisy, definitely

interestingly, i now think cavities = callow tees (as in shirts). check it.

correctly parsing pavement lyrics not critical to the enjoyment of pavement imo

HS - YES! <3

not sure i could ascribe any meaning to that line either way though

it's about looking up at a woman as she bends down over you, perhaps in the backseat of some car, thinking of the curve of her body as the curve of a river, and maybe remembering the river as a detail from somewhere else, the whole song an accumulation of slightly faded memory fragments, tied together but only associatively

once upon a time i spent a lot of time trying to parse pavement lyrics. enjoyed it quite a bit.

Pretty in Pink soundtrack: THE POLL

love gold soundz, don't get the hate but w/e I'm chill not gonna fret it

^^ a most pavement attitude

never cared much for pavement, but gold soundz is one song by them that i enjoy

high is possibly my fave cure song. hmmm.

The "vocal skills" debate on here is pretty lol when you're comparing Robert Smith who is pretty all over the place.

Hey DPerry, aren't you a big New Order fan? Malkmus is Caruso compared to Bernie's tone-deaf wailings (make no mistake, I love Bernie).

to be fair to Dan, he has pointed out the many times Barney's been horrible.

I was gonna say!

ha i'm really sorry that my cure comparison invited some geir-meets-whiney first-listen "WHERE IS THE MELODIC CRAFT?" hyperbole and the "but you like (weak-voiced new wave band)" meta that followed, honestly just enjoy both these jangle jams a lot, find them kinda similar and lovable.

i like the way that new order is the band that, on paper, threatens to be godawful. piss-poor lyrics, lousy singer, bizarre bass-playing like by someone that just picked up the instrument for the first time, most rudimentary guitar lines, etc.

but in practice they're like the best thing to come out of the western hemisphere in the last century

actually i guess a lot of classic bands are like that if you try breaking it down, though. so, never mind...

Not sure why this discussion is about Pavement in general when "Gold Soundz" is, to my ears, a completely atypical Pavement song -- as can be seen above, lots of people who don't like Pavement like it and lots of people who like Pavement don't like it.

If you don't like "Trigger Cut" or "Frontwards" or "Silence Kit" then, OK, you don't like Pavement.

The Robert Smith vs Stephen Malkmus vocal technique debate is kind of amazing!

(Dan, I think the appeal of Pavement, or at least what I get out of it, has to do with the 'slanting' of what would otherwise be classic pop/rock. See if you can stop hearing the singing style, tuning, and sense of rhythm as mistakes. I hated them on first listen too, by the way, and it's possible that I'm being a bit 'death of the author' about it.)

Robert Smith can actually hit discernible notes; based on this song, I'm not at all convinced that dude from Pavement can (which, you know, is fine when you're trying to do something that isn't tune-driven jangly inoffensive guitar pop, which is what this song sounds like).

I mean, if this can be fine in other contexts, maybe it's interesting to subvert expectations by doing it in tune-driven jangle-pop?

(I know you could probably argue similar things about other bands that I dislike though.)

The Robert Smith vs Stephen Malkmus vocal technique debate is kind of amazing!

(Dan, I think the appeal of Pavement, or at least what I get out of it, has to do with the 'slanting' of what would otherwise be classic pop/rock. See if you can stop hearing the singing style, tuning, and sense of rhythm as /mistakes/. I hated them on first listen too, by the way, and it's possible that I'm being a bit 'death of the author' about it.)

I can see that. It's not really my thing; I generally want my music to be less tuneful/traditional if the singing is going to sound like that.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

it's official, gold soundz is the #1 track of all time

And "High" is the #2.

gold soundz

don't really see any palpable basis of comparison with these songs, but i think gold soundz is better.

cuz you're empty and I'm empty too

"High" is still better.

"Gold Soundz" vs. "Because I Got High"

Gold Sounds pffft

"End" is the best song on Wish and "Stop Breathing" is the best song on Crooked Rain.

real talk

"Gold Soundz" is a marvelous song, but as w/ most Pavement 'hits' I never took pains to remember the title (til this latest P-fork anointment)