#1. Pavement – Wowee Zowee

The moment the ‘smart Nirvana’ showed they were just too smart...

"After Crooked Rain, we probably could’ve written our own ticket," Stephen Malkmus said of Pavement’s transition from album number two to three. With a couple of indie hits (Gold Soundz/ Cut Your Hair) and momentum growing from debut Slanted & Enchanted through Crooked Rain Crooked Rain, the fawning American record industry assumed that ticket would lead straight to crossover success. Uncooperative to the last, the band instead made a sprawling 18-track, 55 minute long album that would become their unlikely masterpiece.

Not that many thought so initially. Everyone from Rolling Stone (“the album jerks mindlessly back and forth”) to Warner Bros. President Danny Goldberg were puzzled. The latter became involved when Matador switched their distribution from Atlantic to Warner Bros (it was short-lived) and his one meeting with Malkmus and Scott Kannberg said it all. "We’re sitting there discussing what we’re going to do with Wowee Zowee," Kannberg recalls in the band’s biography Perfect Sound Forever, "which was this retarded record, and they were listening to see what’s the hit! The president checked out after the first song."

The suits could still be looking for the hit today and they wouldn’t find one. Despite signalling a move away from the bands patented but shackled lo-fi approach, Wowee Zowee is an uncomfortable, peculiar listen. A far more stylised record than anything before or after, there’s more than a hint of self-indulgence at work but the record still oddly grooves and flows. From the uncharacteristically laid-back opening of ‘We Dance’ to the snappy, freak out closer ‘Western Homes’, Wowee Zowee is, like percussionist Bob Nastanovich admits a "tricky little record."

It’s also Nastanovich’s favourite. Indeed it was the first time he, bassist Mark Ibold and drummer Steve West were involved in the recording process, yet the album still has Malkmus and Kannberg’s fingerprints all over it. The former’s dry, cryptic lyrical touch is defter than ever, with concerns ranging from in-it-for-the-money doctors (‘Grounded’) to fear of marriage (‘Rattled by the Rush’) while instrumentally his meandering guitar work is given marked free reign. Kannberg meanwhile was singing his own fuzzier songs (‘Serpentine Pad’, ‘Kennel District’, ‘Western Homes’) for the first time and despite having reservations about the album’s length, admitted on the band’s Slow Century DVD that he’s still totally into it. Malkmus says it was the last classic Pavement record.

Pavement never made a bad record. Even their messy finale Terror Twilight had too many charms to go the wrong way. And while the lo-fi era heralding Slanted & Enchanted is perhaps their most important, the oblique, eclectic Wowee Zowee is their most rewarding. It’s one of those great records that initially sounds disjointed before repaying double on every single revisit. Just be patient.