Word: albums
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...conspicuous shortcomings of the album come on tracks that are limited by a rap vocabulary. “Sweepstakes,” which features Mos Def, contains the album’s only mention of stock hip-hop figures, as the rap star confidently spits, “There’s rappers and dealers and players and me / They say that they’re winners / Okay, well let’s see.” Not only are these rhymes depressingly conventional, but worse, they cast the beats in the background, thereby preventing the best aspect...
...this makes the new release of “Quarantine the Past”—Pavement’s first greatest hits album—so baffling. The very existence of a greatest hits album for this band—whose closest approximation of a hit was 1994’s “Cut Your Hair,” which peaked at the giddy height of 10 on the Billboard Alternative Chart—seems more or less unnecessary, but even when one accepts the notion, this particular collection of songs proves frustratingly off. Many classics make...
...This emphasis on the early part of their career is not in itself problematic, but one marvels at the omission of, for instance, epic “Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain” opener “Silence Kid,” when five other songs from that album are featured, including the pretty but slight “Heaven is a Truck.” Likewise, though many songs from the pre-debut album EPs make a welcome appearance—some of which (“Box Elder,” “Frontwards...
...only album that seems properly given its due is 1997’s “Brighten the Corners,” which is granted four inclusions: the yelping, joyous classic rock song “Stereo;” the winding, wistful “Shady Lane;” the schizophrenic, sped-up “Embassy Row;” and Kannberg’s second-best song, “Date with IKEA.” Pavement’s sedate final album, “Terror Twilight,” gets the short shrift with...
...treatment of 1995’s controversial masterpiece “Wowee Zowee.” Though detractors label “Wowee” undiscerning and disjointed, it seems unlikely that many would advocate for the inclusion of just two of its tracks on a greatest hits album, especially if one of these is the vaguely unsettling, strings and synth-heavy “Fight this Generation.” Inexplicably, this is chosen to end the compilation, despite its resemblance to a horrible Verlaines parody, creepily swirling around itself without going much of anywhere...