Slanted & Enchanted

Uncut - 5 stars out of 5 - "...It still sounds magnificent..." Rolling Stone - Ranked #3 in Rolling Stone's list of 2002's "10 Best Reissues" - "...Bite-size pieces of dada, rock candy cut into hard angles and fish-hook curves..." Mojo - "...The LUXE & REDUXE edition expands S&E with a feast for initiates..." Entertainment Weekly - "...As fresh as next week's sushi...a masterpiece of contradictions...rarely matched before or since." - Rating: A Spin - "...Pavement's idyllic indie-rock masterpiece..." Option - "...Pavement's sound has been perfected on its first LP, already a contender for album of the year....The melodies are much more interesting than most rock out there....Pavement has brought dissonance into the realm of hooks..." Spin - Ranked #5 in Spin Magazine's "90 Greatest Albums of the '90s." Spin - Highly Recommended - "...Pavement makes things happen where nothing happened before..." Q - 4 Stars (out of 5) - "...stands out through sheer breadth of influence and innate accessibility....they play expertly..." Spin - "...Pavement's idyllic indie-rock masterpiece..." Q - Included in Q's list of the `50 Best Albums Of 1992.' Rolling Stone - Included in Rolling Stone's "Essential Recordings of the 90's." Entertainment Weekly - "...brimming with beautiful pop songs....Simultaneously sophisticated and unpretentious, heartfelt and totally goofy....brilliant..." - Rating: A- Spin - Ranked #1 in Spin's list of the `20 Best Albums Of The Year' - "...so rich in melliflluous melodies, elliptical lyrics and thrilling, avant guitar-pop seductions that it renders any and all competition meaningless..." Alternative Press - Ranked #16 in AP's list of the `Top 99 Of '85-'95' - "...represents the first movement from grunge to slackerdom....The guitars mutate, the melodies shift and turn into half-hearted harmonies and everything is pulled together by an ever-building messy momentum and the most perfect sense of vocal phrasing and timing since Lou Reed..." Village Voice - Ranked #2 in the Village Voice's list of the `40 Best Albums Of 1992.' Billboard - "SLANTED wins on raw brilliance alone....[The] debut offers an exhilarating glimpse of greatness to come." Spin - "The lyrics fill the air as well, enigmatic and fresh, stuff about making mistakes, catching angels, listening to the radio, and waiting for your dreams to come shuffling over the horizon, waiting in a sunlight that blisters the soul."

Slanted and Enchanted is a left-field classic, a record that came out of nowhere to help establish a new subgenre of rock & roll. Pavement had already sketched out their sound, as well as their amateurish lo-fi aesthetic, on a series of indie singles before recording their debut, but Slanted and Enchanted is where they pulled all of their disparate sounds together into a distinctive style. At first, the primitive sound of the record is the most gripping thing about Slanted, but soon the true innovations of the record appear through the songs themselves. Stephen Malkmus and Spiral Stairs subvert conventional pop structures, turning melodies inside out, reinterpreting and reworking older songs, and bending genres together. It's a complex, enthralling record, filled with fractured riffs, strong melodies, and cryptic melodies, and with all the hiss and static, Slanted and Enchanted sounds like listening to a distant college radio station -- melodies and hooks keep floating in and out of the mix, with individual lines instead of full lyrics surfacing through the murk. This unique song structure as much as the sound of the album itself makes Slanted and Enchanted an individual, signature work and one of the most influential records of the '90s. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine|