YMMV / Pavement

• Awesome Music: Quite a bit of it, but "Gold Soundz" really takes the cake.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Wowee Zowee isn't as critically acclaimed as their first two albums (though its critical stature has improved in recent years), but some of Pavement's fans consider it their best album due to its bizzare, diverse, Genre Roulette approach - Pavement's White Album or Exile on Main St., basically.
• Nausea Fuel: The first music video for "Rattled by the Rush" doesn't have any disgusting imagery, per se, but it is filled with constant, quick-moving camera movements meant to make the viewer dizzy. This worked a little too well, and it was actually pulled from MTV as a result.
• One-Hit Wonder: The only really successful single they had was 1994's "Cut Your Hair" (#10 Billboard Modern Rock Tracks), which funnily enough is a snarky criticism of selling out and caring more about one's image than the music. In the UK, their equivalent big hit was 1999's "Carrot Rope" (#27), though they were actually a Two-Hit Wonder there, as they had a Top 40 hit prior to "Carrot Rope", which was "Shady Lane".
  • That said, "Harness Your Hopes" was only a B-side yet is pretty much their Signature Song today. Which is both a subversion of the trope and an example of Chart Displacement.
• Signature Song: "Harness Your Hopes", despite being a B-side, has become their most popular track after becoming viral on social media and its huge increase on streaming platforms, especially Spotify. Otherwise, there's their hit "Cut Your Hair".
• Suspiciously Similar Song: One of these for "Cut Your Hair" is the theme song for American sports talk show Pardon The Interruption.
  • Stephen Malkmus has been upfront about "Conduit For Sale!" being an homage to The Fall's "New Face In Hell" - the main guitar riff is nearly identical, and the songs have a similar structure of wordy motormouth verses punctuated by a simpler, one line chorus.
• Tear Jerker: "Gold Soundz" and "Spit on a Stranger" are rather melancholy-sounding. "Fin" is a Downer Ending for Brighten the Corners. And these are undoubtedly not the only examples.
  • Honestly, about two-thirds of their songs could probably qualify for someone, especially starting around Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, when they started doing a lot more ballads. "Stop Breathing", "Newark Wilder", "Fillmore Jive", "Grounded", "Father to a Sister of Thought", and "Pueblo" are particularly pertinent examples from their second and third albums.
  • "Ann Don't Cry" from their final album Terror Twilight, especially because it's sometimes interpreted as having Reality Subtext: on the surface it's a Break-Up Song about a troubled romantic relationship, but it can also be read as being about the band itself breaking up.
• Vindicated by History: Upon initial release, Wowee Zowee was subject to lukewarm reviews and complaints about how little it sounded like their previous albums. Critics (and the band's fandom) have since embraced its more experimental nature.