All This Sounds Gas

(Matador)

Not so long ago, a minimum of two Pavement albums was de rigeur for anyone who took their indie rock cred seriously. With the band’s break-up, this is perhaps no longer the case, and it remains to be seen whether Stephen Malkmus will fly his solo flag quite as high as the Pavement. In the meantime, the other smithereen of the Pavement disintegration, led by ex-Pavement guitarist Spiral Stairs (all guitarists should have names this cool) has come into its own under the moniker Preston School of Industry. Preston’s debut album, All This Sounds Gas, is an album of shameless, shambolic and possibly pointless waster-rock, it is also a wonderfully pretentionless record of a band diving head-first into their record collection like one of those big foam-rubber pits and throwing stuff around to their hearts’ content. It is hard to imagine that the School take their music half as seriously as many of their Pavement-mourning listeners will. Others, however, can simply enjoy the infectious irreverence of it all.

The music bounces around between pop (“Falling Away,” sounds like endearing high-school rock), country (the tobacco-chewing slide guitar on “A Treasure @ Silver Bank”) and the indie sound that made him famous. Stairs has a voice that is half American Damon Albarn and half John Frusciante—often lazy, never overbearing, which means that his voice becomes just another instrument. The lyrics are either so nonsensical or sufficiently obscure that it’s tricky to tell the difference between the two: “Driving the whalebones home / 18 hours ago / Lots of water in tow.” But it is difficult not to fall for lines like, “Optometrist to the stars / Had it lucky with tarot cards.” The music is in the best imitation-is-the-highest-compliment derivative style: “History of the River” borrows its guitars from Neil Young’s “Sleeps with Angels,” while “Take a Stand” purloins its melody from an old Grandaddy tune. It seems that the break-up of the ever-higher profile Pavement has allowed Stairs and his cronies to relax and enjoy themselves a little more, and maybe let us do the same.

—Andrew R. Iliff

Money Mark

Change is Coming

(Emperor Norton Records)