Pavement, Sunday Times, February 02, 1997

'Notebooks out, plagiarists!" ran the sleeve notes of the Fall's 1991 album Shiftwork. The veteran Manchester band's frontman, Mark E Smith, tends towards an inventive paranoia, but in the case of the American indie quintet Pavement, he couldn't have been more right. Their acclaimed 1991 debut, Slanted and Enchanted, was the sound of the Fall's back catalogue invigorated by a youthful American college band's lightness of touch and a stateside slacker's knowing sense of irony. Even so, Pavement's wholesale reappropriation of Smith's consonant-ridden jargon still seemed a little brazen. Wasn't Slanted and Enchanted's Our Singer just an exact rewrite of the Fall's Hip Priest? "Yeah it was," Stephen Malkmus, Pavement's wiry, bookish singer and guitarist admits, "but there were other songs too. Conduit for Sale was New Face in Hell. Jackals, False Grails; The Lonesome Era was The Classical. It didn't worry me at the time. I don't know what I was thinking," he muses idly, as if he'd never considered the subject before. "We don't sound like them any more."

This much is true. Since their scratchy lo-fi four-track singles of the late 1980s, Pavement have blossomed from inspired copyists to fully fledged artists who, on last year's Wowee Zowee, finally found their own voice. With their new album, Brighten the Corners, released on Domino records on February 10, Pavement have managed to retain their alluring, ramshackle charm and ally it to a set of distinctive songs - the wry humour of Stereo, the gorgeous folk rock of Shady Lane and the shuffling jazz inflections of Blue Hawaiian. Brighten the Corners is an album only Pavement could have made. But appropriately, Pavement themselves are about to find out what it feels like to be the subject of comparisons.

The eponymous fifth album from Britpop flag-bearers Blur allegedly indulges their suppressed love of American indie rock stylings, especially Pavement's. Malkmus doesn't hear that much of Pavement in it. "I think the overall tone could be equated to our last album, Wowee Zowee," he offers, "in that it covers loads of different genres, with mellow bits and aggressive bits going back and forth, but as far as individual notes go - no, it's not like us. I think it still has Blur's English Kinks/folky part to it. But what I like about Blur is Damon's singing. He has a voice that doesn't annoy me."

Pavement are probably one of the only American bands Blur could use as a new template, their stock of classic British rock being exhausted. Most American bands have a coast-to-coast road-tested lack of contrivance, but Pavement used to be too clever by half. While Oasis, blissfully untroubled by intellectual anxieties, are ideally equipped to speak to the child in all of us, Blur and Pavement are more likely to engage the head than the heart or the gut. Malkmus concurs, albeit defensively: "I think there's parts of our sound that you could react to emotionally. I try hard to have soul, but maybe there's some irony and necessary self-consciousness that you can't help having if you've got a brain. I want to listen to someone who is clever and smart, like Bob Dylan, not just some raw-emotion person with no brain."

Malkmus has admitted in the past that Pavement have a tendency to play "in inverted commas", but elaborates: "If anyone's guilty of inverted commas then it's British bands in general. The Britpoppers are much more referential to other music in that way than us." One would hope that in giving a song on the new album the appalling title I'm Just a Killer for Your Love, Blur were using a fairly bold set of inverted commas, but Malkmus won't be drawn into criticising his new-found fans. He's now a regular house guest of Albarn and his girlfriend, Justine Frischmann. Frischmann's band Elastica, successfully sued for plagiarism by both Wire and the Stranglers, were once described by Malkmus as "representing the 1990s disease of wholesale nihilism about creativity", but he now tries to put an apologetic gloss on the comment.

"Er...well...I mean it's just a different kind of thing. It's just more controlled, more anal, I guess. I think she has different goals to us." In a single bound Malkmus escapes. "Justine wants her album to be the perfect statement for now, and I'm envious of that in a lot of ways. And I think Damon decided this is what it is for this year and he carries it out to its end, and there's something honourable about that, too." Pavement, Malkmus suggests, don't operate to such a rigid agenda, and Brighten the Corners is the first album they've rehearsed before recording. "What we do in a lot of ways is, like, more of a dartboard," he says bewilderingly. "I don't really know about music being a pop cultural movement or representing middle-class youth culture or working-class consciousness in a song. I think of music as an art thing. I try to keep it sort of loose for that reason."

Malkmus is painting a picture of our champion Britpoppers actually aspiring to make disposable ephemera. But as Blur set about spinning a new web of idiomatic cross-references, so Pavement are consolidating the escape from the bonds of theirs. And in a show at the London Astoria 10 days ago, the Pavement/Fall comparisons ended, too. Where Mark E Smith stands aloof from the Fall, looking like a vicious soldier ant sternly surveying his labouring workers, Malkmus stands only a little to the side of Pavement, glowing with the benign pride of a parent at the school nativity play, as if he finds his band mates' attempts to push out new shapes from guitar, bass and drums inexplicably endearing.