Kevin Bronson on April 16th, 2010

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Review and photographs by Jeff Miller

A quarter of the way through their set last night at the Fox Theater in Pomona, Pavement – perhaps the most cultishly adored mid-’90s indie-rock band, just now reunited for the first time in a decade or so – began playing their song “Shady Lane” a bassline-driven surrealist ode to … something (like most of the band’s songs, the lyrics are more out-there-interesting than anything approaching direct). The 10 of us waiting in line outside for drinks smiled broadly, singing along with singer Steve Malkmus, giving each other huge I-can’t-believe-this grins: a brothers-in-arms moment if there ever was one.

A boozy reveler looked at me, gleaming, and said: “They’re so tight – this can’t be a Pavement show!”

And that’s the nail on the head, right there: The most ironic thing about Pavement’s ultra-anticipated reunion (tickets for their Central Park shows sold out a year in advance) isn’t bowl haircuts or slackerdom mantras, it’s that Pavement was never a great live band to begin with. During their heyday, in fact, they were as well known for being abysmally unwatchable as they were for being undeniably smart; at their last performance at Coachella in 1999 (the band returns for a mainstage set on Sunday), Malkmus played with his back to the audience for nearly the whole show.

Well, no more: Pavement’s now a band with a purpose, namely, to become the group their true believers thought they were all along, but that the band was too caught up (or too young) to realize they were. The songs are the same: the souped-up near-country rock of “Range Life,” the messy, chugalug of “Two States,” the starry eyed meandering of “Summer Babe.” But in their time off the don’t-give-a-fuck attitude of the band members has become directed rather than disjointed: Age has made screamer/multi-instrumentalist Bob Nastanovich now seem like a bank teller angsting-out on his day off rather than a college student letting out post-exam catharsis; bassist Mark Ibold (a sometime member of Sonic Youth) bounces around solidly rather than staring longingly at his instrument; guitarist Scott Kannberg’s solos have a purpose, even if the noisy ones are caught in the confines of the theater; drummer Steve West actually can, you know, play.

But none of that holds a candle to the change in Malkmus himself, who’s been pulling his weight with the proggy outfit the Jicks in Pavement’s lengthy post-breakup era. Gone is his too-serious tone and his frontman demeanor, replaced by a sometime-singer, sometime-shouter, whose guitar-swinging, stage-jumping, occasional-note-missing vibe’s a reminder of why anyone found him charming in the first place. He’s a man with a mission, and he knows it: not exactly what you expect from the king of slackerdom, but, hey, everyone’s got to get a job sometime, right?