Pavement - Wowee Zowee

With Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, Pavement had a clear path to the big time. They answered with Wowee Zowee: eighteen songs, nearly an hour, and no interest whatsoever in taking that path. Released on Matador in April 1995 and named for an exclamation favored by former drummer Gary Young, it was greeted at the time as scattered and sloppy. It has since become the record that a great many fans consider the band's best.

Most of it was tracked in ten days at Easley Recording in Memphis in November 1994, and it plays like a band emptying every pocket. The woozy opener "We Dance" gives way to the lopsided strut of "Rattled by the Rush," the pedal steel drift of "Father to a Sister of Thought," and the long, gorgeous unspooling of "Grounded." In between come punk outbursts, country detours, and Spiral Stairs's ringing "Kennel District." Stephen Malkmus sequenced the whole thing himself, a first for the band, and the lurching flow is the point.

The album reached number 18 in the UK and number 117 on the Billboard 200, and its two singles went nowhere. Time has been far kinder. Its sprawl now reads as freedom, and it regularly lands on lists of the greatest albums ever made.

This Matador pressing follows the original vinyl layout: two LPs in a gatefold sleeve with music on three sides, and a fourth side left intentionally blank. The definitive way to get lost in Pavement's strangest and most generous record.