Pavement, Vicar Street, review: Strolling back the years with magnificent Dublin gig
Pavement live in Vicar Street, Dublin. Picture: Noel Baker
★★★★★
While grunge ruled the zeitgeist in the early 1990s, Pavement were the sarcastic kids at the back of the class. They even started a half-hearted feud with the Smashing Pumpkins when taking a potshot at the chart-topping mewlers on early single Range Life.
That tune made a languid reappearance towards the end of a Vicar Street set turbo-charged with Gen X nostalgia. An ambling melody rubbed up against sardonic lyrics delivered with gangling gusto by frontman Stephen Malkmus. It was heritage pop for the Kurt Cobain generation.
Pavement were a moderately popular indie band first time around. But on this, their second reunion tour, they returned as unlikely conquering heroes. Vicar Street was crammed for the first of two sold-out shows. The alternative dad rock that the quintet of 50-somethings delivered was received with an enthusiasm that often tipped into rapturousness.
The caricature of Pavement is that they were pop’s ultimate slackers – a Richard Linklater film made flesh. However, there was also a bittersweet undertow to songs which, if outwardly charming and bedraggled, brimmed with a painful yearning.
The gloom was there in Vicar Street. You could feel it in Summer Babe, their sun-baked 1991 anthem with winter in its bones.
And in the indie-goth ballad Here, where Malkmus captured the sense of being in your early 20s and feeling your life is going nowhere ( even backwards). “I always dressed for success,” he sang. “But success it never comes.” But that ennui was offset by an appealing goofiness. Lanky and mercurial, Malkmus still carried himself like alt. pop minor royalty.
The rest of Pavement, though, have the vibe of best mates who’ve been let out for a mildly wild night out and had forgotten how to really cut loose (The same could be said for the crowd). Their enthusiasm was no doubt fuelled by the fact that several are no longer full-time musicians: drummer Steve West is a stone-mason; backing vocalist Bob Nastanovich works as a horse rating data analyst. They were returning to a chapter in their lives they had half forgotten and couldn’t quite believe it.
As with the Pixies, Pavement have found that their profile has grown while they were away. Which means there was a ready audience for the knotty Trigger Cut and In the Mouth a Desert. And for Harness Your Hopes, an obscurity from their fourth album which has become huge on streaming.
The loudest cheers, however, were for their lilting “hit” Cut Your Hair. They first performed that song around the release 28 years ago of their LP Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain – a tour that stoppped off at a rammed Sir Henry’s in Cork. This time, the venue was bigger the audience older – but Pavement’s wonky underdog magic endured.
