Review

The shot heard 'round the indie rock world.
A classic New York story. A couple fresh-faced lads move from their safe college town to the big city and fall in love with the freedom of making tomorrow's sounds today. Pavement were modernist noise makers like Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker inventing bop at their late night jam sessions, or the Bronx revolutionaries who wrought hip-hop out of the rotten Apple in the '70s. Slanted is beauty collapsing, sweetness fading into static, a soft-rock séance amidst the clatter and drone of lo-fi legends like the Fall and Swell Maps. It's a summer record recorded mid-winter in a recession year, a beach record Ingmar Bergman would have liked. About 100,000 people liked it too, making a small thing seem bigger than it ever had before.