#range life

The soundtrack, like the movie (which, full disclosure, I haven’t seen) follows three parallel storylines: a documentary about actual Pavement and its history; a weirdly clunky biopic called Range Life starring Stranger Things’ Joe Keery as Malkmus; and a supremely ill-advised musical called Slanted! Enchanted! From the reviews, it sounds like the concept works better on film than it does in the soundtrack. It works very poorly here. There are 41 tracks, 22 of them you’ll want to hear once, at most.

The most awful stuff comes from the musical, putting a cheery, technically proficient, lobotomized gloss on Pavement’s twisty, torturous songs. Want to hear “Give It a Day” belted, not rasped or slurred? Got you covered. Ever imagined “Rattled by the Rush” as an all-hands, all-singing, all-dancing finale? Again, this is for you. I was a reluctant convert to David Byrne’s Broadway extravaganza, but this is not that.

The cuts from the biopic are almost as icky, and come across as lunkish, overly literal interpretations of the Pavement mystique. Here’s Keery musing on whether playing Malkmus will win him an award and stumbling through an earnest rendition of “Range Life.” There’s the dejected members of Pavement sitting around after a disastrous set at Lollapalooza 1995.  Here’s Cosloy pledging that he will never, ever sell Pavement out in a stairwell. The line readings are flat, the dialogue obvious, and, sure maybe it’s all a joke that comes out better on film, but it is deadly, deadly dull here in the soundtrack.

But, for all that, Pavements includes a trove of live and alternate takes—actual music played by actual band members—that makes the case for Pavement as a monster band. The Peel Session “Circa 1762” is a blistering, obliterating rampage, Malkmus skating slippery over a monumental buzz; a rehearsal take of “Witchi-Tai-To” is volatile magic. A nine-minute live version of “Type Slowly” aches and flutters and swaggers, a mix of over-literate angst and rock ‘n roll grandeur.

Indeed, when late in the track listing, Keery talks about shedding the Malkmus persona he’s taken on for the role, he suggests a solution. While he’s exorcising any traces of Malkmus from himself (and to be honest, I see very few), how about we start taking him and the music theater nerds and film clips out of Pavements? There. Perfect.