Shadow puppets

Slanted And Enchanted may have just turned 30, but it was Pitchfork's oral history of the other bookend to Pavement's career, the much less celebrated Terror Twilight, that caught my eye recently.

Stuart Berman begins by drawing a parallel between the Fab Five and the Fab Four that at first glance seems audacious but actually makes a lot of sense: "What the Beatles were to '60s pop, Pavement were to '90s indie rock - the definitive, pace-setting act of the decade who underwent many surprising and substantial evolutions in a tidy 10-year lifespan". I'm not sure the latter's evolutions were anything like as substantial, and the suggestion that the slacker gods set any kind of pace raises a smirk - but Berman nevertheless has a point. Terror Twilight, he observes, is their Let It Be - a swansong recorded by a band falling apart that has the "fancy fingerprints" of a bigshot perfectionist all over it.

The oral history that follows essentially confirms the existing narrative about the album: that it was blighted by tensions between Stephen Malkmus and the other members over songwriting responsibilities and dedication, and between the band and producer Nigel Godrich over the recording process and finished product.

Unusually for Pavement, the record began with Malkmus delivering a bunch of demos and the band then slowly fleshing them out. This seems to have led to jadedness, irritation and resentment on Malkmus' part - as Bob Nastanovich puts it, Malkmus "was the only person who was doing serious homework". By now, the others were scattered across the US, and to the frontman, their continued commitment to the cause seemed questionable. The result wound up being more like a Malkmus solo record than any of their previous LPs, not least because Scott Kannberg aka Spiral Stairs was too late in bringing his own potential contributions to the table - though he did at least get his way over the track sequencing.

In such circumstances, an outsider's influence may have helped to heal the wounds, but sadly Pavement's relationship with Godrich - established after Domino's Laurence Bell played matchmaker - appears to have been somewhat fraught from the off. The English producer - fresh from working on Radiohead's masterpiece OK Computer - is by his own tongue-in-cheek admission "a horrible egotistical control freak", and the band chafed against his methods, which included demands for repeat takes.

While no one seems in any doubt as to the fact that Godrich genuinely was a Pavement fan, the terms in which he describes them - "delightfully shambolic" - ring alarm bells. It's a patronising perspective, as though he saw them as a quaint little project he could work on and polish. Sure enough, Steve West talks about him taking "a little bit of the ol' slack out of the slacker band" and claims diplomatically that "I think Nigel did a fabulous job in getting us as tight as we could be". The problem was, of course, was that they weren't all that keen on being tight. Nastanovich's comment about the songs is revealing: "I knew once we got them in a live setting [in other words, out of Godrich's reach], they would take on their own life, and would very much sound like Pavement: semi-professional and filled with imperfections". His implication is clear: Terror Twilight is not really a Pavement record.

More than two decades on, Mark Ibold remains lukewarm about it - "I think it all sounds all right - I've grown used to it" - and Malkmus and Nastanovich are not much more enthusiastic. No doubt the difficult circumstances of its creation and the subsequent split still make it hard for them to listen to. But, while it's not my favourite (that would be its predecessor Brighten The Corners), I agree with Kannberg and Godrich that ultimately Terror Twilight has stood the test of time well - certainly better than many other records of that period.