Pavement’s first record, the one where Gary Young pounds the drums so charmingly, is a mystical collection of lo-fi alt-rock pounders, weird sketches of songs, like the greatest demo tape you’ve ever heard. The question that always comes up, though, is what happens once you’ve released that kind of classic? For Pavement, the answer was to switch out their drummer and try to peel back some of the layers of obfuscation that the band had previously wrapped their songs in. Consider “Cut Your Hair” – one of the greatest singles of the 1990s – against the most half-way commercial track from Slanted And Enchanted. It’s night and day.

And yet – the band managed to encompass the slacker ideal that underpinned the grunge era without ever once trying to become a commercial grunge band a la Pearl Jam or their imitators. Just because Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain is more commercial than Slanted and Enchanted does not make it a ‘commercial’ record, per se. The hooks are more present, but that’s more because they chose not to bury them the second time around, rather than any change in their actual approach. The songs on album two were just as inscrutable, but they were also easier to sing along to.

Of course, some of them aren’t so inscrutable. Perpetual middle class cool guy Stephen Malkmus opened up a little more, opting for sharper images here and there that you could understand at a glance, as it were. Instead of skronky stories about Herr Barockter trying to sell off parcels of land, Crooked Rain went in more for songs about the travails of skateboarding, the music industry, L.A. hipsters, and how the Smashing Pumpkins were kind of a bunch of pretentious dorks. Even as a Pumpkins fan, “Range Life” is still a treat 30 years on, sing-warbling along with Malkmus about how he doesn’t understand what they mean and how he could really give a fuck. Part of the fun, of course, is that oftentimes you can hurl the same thing back at Malkmus. What is “Stop Breathin” about? War? Tennis? Camp? Who knows. Beyond the obvious connotations of the title, what does “Heaven Is A Truck” mean? It’s all vibes, but the key thing here is that the vibes are immaculate. You can sing along with lines like “She is the Queen of the Casa Pasadena thrill” without really grasping what he’s talking about and it’s still a great time. When the meanings open up again on “Fillmore Jive” and pair up with an epic, classic rock-inspired long jam, complete with Malkmus moaning about how all these industry parties are making him lose sleep, you hear Pavement at their absolute peak, as great a closing number as any from their era.

It would be the height of the band’s powers. After Crooked Rain they were a critical buzz band, the kind that seemed poised to recreate magic like “Cut Your Hair” on a bigger Billboard level. Instead they went wide, releasing a sprawling double album of experimental and punk-inflected rockers that spawned precisely zero hit singles. They kept going until the end of the decade and while there were some killer songs (“Stereo”, “Shady Lane”, “Carrot Rope”) they garnered none of the success that they deserved but, in the spirit of 90s indie, clearly didn’t want. Yet still they’re considered one of the pillar bands of the decade, which really goes to show you how deeply embedded this record became once we were out and looking back. It’s a lot like Neutral Milk Hotel’s In The Aeroplane Over The Sea in that sense – maybe not a massive commercial hit at the time, but looking back, it becomes a key player in a time that you can’t separate it from.