Since
Pavement switched course with each record --
Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain was nothing like
Slanted & Enchanted, and
Brighten the Corners was decidedly different from the brilliant, warped
Wowee Zowee -- it's a little disarming to realize that
Terror Twilight merely deepens the sound of its predecessor. Guitars burst to the forefront every so often -- most notably on the dense jam "Platform Blues" and the shouted choruses of "Billie" -- yet they're usually used as texture. Nothing rocks hard and "The Hexx," which was heard on the
Brighten tour as a metallic epic, has been transformed into a surrealistic dream, reminiscent of
the Velvet Underground's "Ocean." That's typical of
Terror Twilight -- it's reflective, with the occasional flight of fancy that fits neatly into the laid-back flow. It's also the tightest record
Pavement ever made, largely due to producer
Nigel Godrich, who helped rein in excessive tendencies in
Radiohead and
Beck and does the same here. The band still sounds like
Pavement -- their loping interplay is unmistakable -- and
Stephen Malkmus' songs are typically dense and literate, yet they're easier to digest. That, along with the lack of
Spiral Stairs songs, gives
Terror Twilight a cohesion missing even on earlier
Pavement albums, no matter how great they were. All the focus makes the album feel a little less like
Pavement -- after all, this is a band whose imperfections were among their most endearing qualities -- and a bit more like
Malkmus' first solo album, which it essentially is. Though it's hard not to miss the gloriously messy sprawl of
Pavement at their peak, this carefully crafted, languid recasting of their signature sound is effective and winds up as a fitting, bittersweet farewell for the best band of the '90s. [Appearing nearly 14 years after the expanded Nicene Creedence Edition of
Brighten the Corners, the expanded reissue of
Pavement's final album
Terror Twilight -- a released billed as "Farewell Horizontal" -- contains a wealth of unheard material, ranging from excavated tunes and demos to a host of B-sides and live performances, plus in its LP variation it restores the original track listing assembled by producer
Nigel Godrich. With all the trippier material pushed toward the front of the record -- it opens with the
Beefheart freak-out "Platform Blues" leading into "The Hexx" --
Godrich's incarnation has a drastically different flow than the finished record, plus it contains "Shagbag," a short, shambling instrumental inserted before "Speak, See, Remember." That song is also featured in its earliest incarnation as "Terror Twilight," one of the many demos here. Most of the reissue is devoted to demos, recordings made by either
Stephen Malkmus on his own or with the band running through the material in a variety of studios, including Echo Canyon and Jackpot. Among the most interesting of these are the solo
Malkmus demos where he's working out songs on a Moog synthesizer, an instrument that sounds particularly wild on an early version of "Folk Jam." Most of the material here is from
Malkmus, underscoring how Scott Kannberg didn't have many new songs ready to go, but there are a couple of
Spiral Stairs gems unearthed here, including the fizzy pop of "Stub Your Toe." Unheard songs aren't the primary attraction on "Farewell Horizontal, though. The pleasure of this set is hearing
Pavement work and play as a band, stretching out on an almost-eight-minute version of "You Are a Light" in Jackpot studio, feeling their way through an instrumental backing track for "Preston School of Industry" (a song title Kannberg would later take for his solo project), or tear it up on-stage: the closing stretch of live tracks finds the band sounding especially muscular, particularly on a ferocious version of
Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Sinister Purpose."] ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine