Pavement

There’s nothing like a gig where everyone in the room is ecstatic just to be there. Ten years after calling it quits, Pavement’s 2010 worldwide reunion tour sees the five-piece blatantly flaunt the best of their 8-year back catalogue, and serves as reminder of just how brilliantly addictive a killer hook, sloppily executed, can be.

Pavement’s innate songwriting talent, despite any resolute lo-fi aesthetic, combined with a sound that has never really dated, has seen them acquire new fans with each passing year of inactivity. Stephen Malkmus being one of the most influential and listenable guitarists of the age doesn’t do any harm either.

Early classics ‘Cut Your Hair’, ‘Gold Soundz’, ‘Range Life’ and ‘Stereo’ all make an appearance but where they hit the sublime is in expertly crafted such as ‘Grounded’, ‘Date w/ IKEA’ and ‘Starlings In The Slipstream’.

The only people who didn’t seem particularly engaged with what they were doing were Pavement, but this, and the absence of a second encore (as featured in prior dates), are fleeting niggles. With a back catalogue this great, they’ve every right to earn a living wage from it, whenever they feel like it.