Pavement at Tokyo Dome City Hall, February 16th 2023

 

I’ve heard a lots of people saying that a piece of music stopped them in their tracks. I remember that happening to me a couple of times. Once was at the Ochanomizu Disk Union Jazz store, listening to Free For All by Art Blakey and The Jazz Messengers. The other one was in my car, while driving on my way to class more than twenty years ago.

I was driving my beat up 1993 Hyundai Scoupe, going to an afternoon class, when a tune on KXLU made me literally stop and park by the curb to wait until the DJ announced the title. It started with a piercing high pitched distorted sound, almost like an alarm. Then it transitioned to an ascending unending melody line, no chorus or bridge, with layers of guitars over it. Culminating in a more traditional but also infectious guitar-bass instrumental break. The song was Texas Never Whispers, a non-album cut only to be found on the Watery Domestic EP. This was my introduction to Pavement. I discovered them a year after they disbanded this way. I ended up working at KXLU and got CD-Rs of most of their recordings patiently copying the ones at the station in one of those old CD recorders machines.

I got to see them in their 2010 reunion, headlining the Primavera Sound Festival an amazing show that’s on YouTube and I watch from time to time to reminisce. And just like that show, after an effective opening set by the Japanese indie band Mitsume, they opened with Cut Your Hair.

With such an opener they established a level of energy that never declined. Pavement’s music is for the most part uplifting. The lyrical content might not be, necessarily, but I know that listening to them puts me in a great mood and that carried to the show. Getting to see two of my favorites played back to back, Black Out followed by Frontwards, was a huge treat. The setlist included so many excellent cuts. Box Elder, Starlings of the Slipstream, We Dance, Type Slowly, just to name the ones that were standouts for me. In my opinion the band sounded more focused than  in 2010. The ‘professionalism’ sort of reduced a bit of the fun of that show from 13 years ago, but don’t get me wrong, even though there was none of that sense of tension that they still displayed back then and perhaps made them edgier, more ‘dangerous’, the sound that this focused six piece, with an added keyboard player, achieved was epic. In addition to the tasty visuals projected in the large screen behind them.

Fillmore Jive closed the set and the band returned for an encore that ended with Range Life and the appropriately titled Fin. A close to their last Tokyo show of the tour and a testament to a fact I discovered over twenty years ago. That is that only a handful of bands have explored the rock and roll language to express happiness and melancholy the way that Pavement have done. 

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