"Summer Babe"

Pavement
(Matador, 1991)

After this milestone, Pavement spent the decade inventing ways both to recapture and to renounce its slanted enchantment, the consummation of generations of pencil-necked punk romance. The lyrics here seem like everything, but they're nothing without Steve Malkmus lumbering and tumbling forward with sweet, tired longing -- which would be nothing without the guitar roiling behind him expressing all the feeling his voice restrains. Words, voice, and roil become one in Malkmus's climactic wail of "Don't go!", which, as one critic said, raises the specter of Bob Dylan. And of your last broken heart.

-- Franklin Soults