Gold Soundz

The guitar tones here are elastic and slightly bent, like the strings themselves are made of something more pliable than metal, and the bass walks underneath with a loping ease that gives the whole song a perpetually sideways feeling. It never quite settles into a groove so much as it drifts through one, unhurried and slightly detached. There's a harmonic looseness that should feel sloppy but instead feels deliberate — Pavement had an almost academic understanding of how to make imprecision feel expressive. Stephen Malkmus sings in a drawl that seems to know something you don't, his delivery perpetually understated, slipping past the most vivid images in the lyrics without breaking a sweat. The words circle around nostalgia, around the strange weight of the past, around the suspicion that time spent with the right people in the right moment is irreplaceable and already gone. It's a song that feels like a fading photograph — warm, slightly out of focus, enormously specific and yet impossible to fully hold. Pavement defined the mid-nineties indie rock moment in America more completely than almost any other band, and this track sits at the center of that claim. It sounds like college towns in autumn, like the particular melancholy of realizing you are inside a good era while it is still happening. You put this on when you're driving somewhere familiar that already feels like memory, when you're feeling nostalgic for the present.