Pavement

Pavement’s last album, 1999’s ‘Terror Twilight,’ sounds like a last album.

Before Pavement’s debut album, ‘Slanted and Enchanted,’ came out on April 20, 1992, the band had already released a handful of EPs and a single.

Everyone agrees that Pavement’s 1992 debut album, ‘Slanted and Enchanted,’ is a milestone record in the history of indie rock, an undisputed classic, one of the few original works of the past quarter century, blah blah blah. But ‘Slanted’’s follow-up, ‘Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain,’ is the better album, a tuneful exercise in noise-rock restraint and myth crumbling.

Karl Walter, Getty Images No band is an island. The best songwriters tend to be sponge-like soaker-uppers of music, film, fine art, literature and other forms of culture, be they popular or obscure, and these influences often find their way into the music, helping listeners branch out and develop new interests ...