Pavement, the band, comes highly recommended by one of my friends. I haven’t heard any of their stuff, or if I have I didn’t know it was them, but I was browsing their albums on Amazon and came across a review of Crooked Rain that I’ve copied below.

Now, I’m not into the whole emo scene (another friend informs me that the term “emo” is now deprecated, and the culture formerly known as emo prefers to be called “hipster“), but after reading this review I felt compelled to purchase the album if only just to see what would cause such a vivid re-imagining of a moment in time.

Listening to Range Life from Crooked Rain as I write this…

i was asked once what my favorite pavement songs were…

there are some pavement songs which fit certain moods *perfectly*, and at those times, i don’t have a choice but to count them as my favorites. for instance…i was in new york a few springs ago, spending the evening with the girl i’d had a brief-yet-effective romance with the summer before. she was there with a guy; i was there with two other girls, mutual friends. the five of us were in an underground, literal-hole-in-the-wall-type bar, tucked away inside a subway station at 50th street (i think). the bar was called siberia, and was a total punk/russian (prussian?) paradise. every light bulb was red, and there was writing on every inch of the walls and tables. the lone bathroom stall had a gaping three foot hole busted out of the wall on one side, through which you could see only blackness. the sofas had long ago collapsed on their stumpy legs and fallen to the sticky floor, where they laid dejected and off-balance. cushions were missing and the beer was extremely expensive. i got drunk and watched her…got drunk on the beer and the nostalgia both, pressed myself into a musty corner of the couch, and after a while, closed my eyes. there was a jukebox. it was the brightest and biggest thing in the whole place. it had “crooked rain, crooked rain” in it. i played “fillmore jive,” wallowed in its brilliant decadence…i played it again then got up and roamed around manhattan for 5 hours. alone and happy.

that night, “fillmore jive” was my favorite pavement song.