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Irish Times
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Pavements review: Brilliantly unclassifiable salute to the 1990s indie-rock legends Pavement
Pavements Director : Alex Ross Perry Cert : None Genre : Documentary Starring : Pavement, Rebecca Clay Cole, Gary Young, Joe Keery, Nat Wolff, Fred Hechinger, Logan Miller, Griffin Newman, Tim Heidecker, Jason Schwartzman, Michael Esper, Zoe Lister-Jones, Kathryn Gallagher Running Time : 2 hrs 6 mins Alex Ross Perry 's Pavements is a love letter, a mischievous jape and a deconstructed rock documentary all at once, a brilliantly unclassifiable salute to the 1990s indie-rock legends Pavement that improbably juggles four separate projects (a documentary, a musical, an art exhibit and a fake biopic) into one shaggy, self-aware, mostly made-up opus. It shouldn't work. And yet this overstuffed eclair stays sweet. Perry, whose coruscating Courtney Love-adjacent drama Her Smell demonstrated a keen faculty for musical chaos, pivots that instinct toward unbridled creative joy. The film is framed around Pavement's 2022 reunion tour, but it quickly spirals outwards into giddy metafiction. Stranger Fiction's Joe Keery leans hilariously hard into method acting as the Pavement frontman, Stephen Malkmus , in the fictitious biopic Range Life. Real and fake artefacts are carefully curated into Pavements 1933–2022, a gallery show. Eager musical tryouts belt out Fin in an earnest, off-Broadway musical. These are not just grandiloquent gags. They slowly form portals into understanding the band's elusive slacker magic. Pavement were never the 1990s sensation that Perry's film pretends. They mooned an irate Kentucky audience at Lollapalooza in 1995 and simply shrugged and walked away from one another in 1999. READ MORE The inventive writer-director makes merry with that anti-arc, trading the bombast and preshadowing of traditional music biopics for something playful, generous and nonsensical. Pavements pokes fun at the genre's many cliches, from tortured-genius montages to melodramatic studio scenes, by re-enacting them with angular absurdity. [ Alex Ross Perry on his Pavement documentary: 'The concept was an absurd notion that this band would ever go gold or platinum' Opens in new window ] That silliness never tips into snark or cynicism, whether it's Keery reverently photographing Malkmus's throat or the band reordering their set list for a bandmate's daughter. Perry and his editor, Robert Greene (using split screens and collage techniques), build a dizzying kaleidoscope of timelines, earnestness and glee. What emerges is a film that's as formally adventurous and oddly affecting as the soundtrack. Pavement's songs, ever teetering between slacker irony and accidental profundity, land the film they richly deserve. And, with a pronounced irony that could only have originated with a Gen X joint, Perry's exaggerated trajectory is mirrored by the band's explosive recent popularity with Gen Z. Pavements is on cinema release and, from Friday, July 11th, on Mubi
Wall Street Journal
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Moisturizer' Review: Wet Leg Doubles Down
If you were an indie-rock fan in 2021, you had an opinion on Wet Leg's debut single, 'Chaise Longue.' The song, built on the quiet/loud structure that defined '90s alternative rock, wasn't formally daring or particularly confrontational, but it rapidly became ubiquitous. And when that happens to a tune from a previously unknown act, some find it hard to trust, wondering if industry machinations might be behind it all. When the band, led by the English duo Rhian Teasdale (lead vocals, guitar) and Hester Chambers (guitar, vocals), finally released its self-titled debut in April 2022, its remit was to prove that there was more to the project than a viral single. It did so handily—'Wet Leg' had at least a half-dozen good-to-great songs and showed a decent amount of stylistic range. Also embedded within 'Wet Leg' were signs of where the band might later go wrong. Here and there, the group's devil-may-care attitude gave way to a more solemn approach that sounded comparatively conventional. It was possible to imagine a future record where Wet Leg teams with a hit-making super-producer, leans toward pop, and chases a younger audience with straightforward songs about relationships and personal growth. Fortunately, the band's second album, 'Moisturizer' (Domino), out Friday, does none of that. Rather, it finds Wet Leg doubling down on what made it stand out in the first place—oddball humor, disarming expressions of lust and catchy, quirky tunes touching on antecedents like the Breeders and Elastica that avoid sounding like mere novelty.
CTV News
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- CTV News
‘We're AI,' popular indie rock band admits
John Vennavally Rao reports on AI-created songs going viral and the accompanying debate over whether they should be clearly labeled for music fans. Paris, France -- An indie rock band with more than a million monthly listeners on Spotify has owned up to being an AI-generated music project following days of speculation about whether the group was real. Named Velvet Sundown -- seemingly a nod to Lou Reed's band The Velvet Underground -- the digital group has become a viral hit, generating ferocious online discussion after racking up hundreds of thousands of listens. An updated Spotify profile, consulted on Tuesday by AFP, admitted that the group was an 'ongoing artistic provocation.' 'All characters, stories, music, voices and lyrics are original creations generated with the assistance of artificial intelligence tools employed as creative instruments,' Velvet Sundown's profile added. Recently created social media profiles, featuring photos of the group that look suspiciously fake, have teased readers about the group's origins, offering often contradictory information. Experts have long warned about the dangers of AI-image, video and music generators blurring the lines between the real and fake. A major study in December by the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC), which represents more than five million creators worldwide, warned about the danger of AI-generated music. It forecast that artists could see their incomes shrink by more than 20 percent in the next four years as the market for AI-composed music grows. Stockholm-based streamer Spotify declined to comment directly about Velvet Sundown when contacted by AFP. Spokeswoman Geraldine Igou wrote that the platform does not 'prioritize or benefit financially from music created using AI tools.' 'All tracks are created, owned, and uploaded by licensed third parties,' Igou insisted. Rival music streaming service Deezer displayed a warning for 'AI-generated content' for Velvet Sundown. 'Some tracks on this album may have been created using artificial intelligence,' it said. The Spotify rival has an AI-music detection tool that is able to identify songs generated using popular software models such as Suno and Udio. Deezer said in April that it was receiving more than 20,000 fully AI-generated tracks on a daily basis, comprising 18 percent of all uploaded content, an increase from the previously reported 10 percent in January. Reports on Tuesday said an imposter posing as U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had been using AI-generated voice and text messages to high-level officials and foreign ministers.
Irish Times
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Alex Ross Perry on his Pavement documentary: ‘The concept was an absurd notion that this band would ever go gold or platinum'
More than 16 years into his film-making career, Alex Ross Perry can shake the most algorithm-trodden viewers out of their complacency. His unapologetically caustic, literary milieu, populated by spiky, self-absorbed humans, remains defiantly indie, made on modest budgets, with zero concessions towards 'relatable' entertainment norms. In Listen Up Philip , from 2014, Jason Schwartzman plays a misanthropic novelist who alienates everyone around him. In Her Smell, playing Becky Something, Elisabeth Moss delivers a ferocious performance as a volatile, drug-addled punk rocker. In the earlier Queen of Earth , Moss excelled as a grieving woman descending into paranoia. The film-maker's devoted following intersects with that of Paul Schrader, John Cassavetes and the American authors Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth. Pavements, Perry's new hybrid documentary portrait of Pavement, indie rock's least-bothered legacy act, is a thrillingly maximalist curveball from an auteur with such a disciplined, character-driven oeuvre. It's a world away from those films that Perry's cinematographer, Sean Price Williams, has described as 'people talking in rooms'. READ MORE 'You hope that everything you create will be a new process, no matter what,' says Perry. 'You're looking for that every time in some way or another. But, by definition, there are 40 primary characters in Pavements whom you're keeping track of. That is extremely rare and complicated – except for movies like Nashville [directed by Robert Altman, from 1975]. 'The movie is actually really several smaller movies. The challenge was making little tiny movies that fit into a bigger movie. I wanted to make something complicated and unprecedented.' Nearly 35 years after a band of self-styled slackers from Stockton, California, emerged with a batch of lo-fi, inscrutable songs, Pavement remain an outlier in American indie rock. They were never meant for the mainstream. Formed in 1989 by Stephen Malkmus and Scott Kannberg (aka Spiral Stairs), Pavement began as a studio experiment of distorted guitars and nebulous mumbling. They sold self-distributed cassettes and secured some basement shows. They scored an unexpected success with their much-loved album Slanted and Enchanted from 1992, but their jagged sound and nonsensical lyrics would never truly go mainstream. 'I always was hoping that it was music for the future. I mean, I think everyone who's not that successful in their time tries to think that,' says Malkmus early in Perry's film, a documentary that occasionally gives you the sense that you're watching the biggest act on the planet. A lot is going on. An anchoring timeline chronicles the band's 2022 reunion tour – their first since 2010 – featuring rehearsals and performances from dates across North America and Europe. Off-Broadway, hopefuls audition for Slanted! Enchanted! A Pavement Musical. A pop-up Pavement museum, ostentatiously titled Pavements 1933–2022, features authentic artefacts and apparent fakes. There's more chicanery in Range Life: A Pavement Story, fragments of a grandiloquent Hollywood biopic filmed within the film, starring Joe Keery as Malkmus, with Schwartzman as Chris Lombardi, founder of Matador Records, the band's long-time label. There is even a completely made-up awards-season denouement, featuring Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach. It's an epic sprawl that came together surprisingly quickly following an approach by Matador. Lombardi pitched the idea, with Malkmus giving a clear directive: they didn't want a typical documentary or a scripted screenplay. The frontman's only note was a request for something 'confusing and weird'. 'Within six weeks of being contacted to come up with some sort of radical or unusual idea that could be a suitably unique Pavement movie, all of those strands were there,' says Perry. 'When I look at my early documents, the only thing in my notes that is not in the movie is a fictionalised art-house film – I had the idea that, in addition to a very cliched, silly, bad Hollywood movie, there would be an art film like Edvard Munch by Peter Watkins. All of the ideas were there from the outset. My first thought was the movie ought to be a mosaic.' In 1999, after a decade that had seen them have moderate hits with Cut Your Hair, Gold Soundz and Range Life, Pavement broke up with the same shrugs they brought to their live performances. They had sung and played off-key during shambolic television appearances. Their inclusion on the bill of the Lollapalooza festival in 1995 – an odd fit alongside Sonic Youth, Hole, Cypress Hill, Sinéad O'Connor, Beck and Coolio – almost started a riot. Do Pavement fit Perry's description of his most acerbic creations as 'people who can't get out of their own way'? 'When I first heard Pavement as a young person, I had no understanding of the complexity of what an artist's goals are,' the film-maker says. 'You don't think about that stuff when you're 13. You're just hearing a good song and catching a concert. That level of insight is invisible to a lot of the public, and often only visible in hindsight. 'But it certainly became their story in the 20 years after they broke up. After the reunion it became the story of unfulfilled ambition and missed opportunities and untapped potential. 'During my research for the film, which was all done in 2020, deep into the pandemic, when nobody in the band had seen each other since the 2010 reunion tour, the narratives I was given by everyone involved with the band spoke to that disappointment.' Then came a plot twist. Harness Your Hopes, an obscure track recorded in 1996, unexpectedly became one of the band's most popular songs. Despite never being released as a single or receiving significant radio play at the time, the track gained traction on Spotify in the 2010s – it now has more than 210 million streams – before igniting a dance craze on TikTok. 'At some point, making the movie, I looked at their Spotify page expecting to see Range Life or Cut Your Hair as their number-one songs. And suddenly I'm asking, 'Why does this song have tens of millions more views than everything else?' 'This song hasn't even been on my radar for narrative purposes. And then I googled it and discovered this crazy thing happened. By the time the band were rehearsing for the 2022 tour, this song had blown up and they were playing it as part of every show. I shot the video for it before we shot the movie.' It is a delightful second act, not just for Pavement but for Pavements. Perry's grandiose, counterfactual account of the band now feels strangely prophetic. 'We made this movie over a five-year span,' he says. 'The concept was an absurd notion that this band would ever go gold or platinum. We weren't thinking, Oh, that'll be funny, because sooner or later they'll have gold records. It was, like, This is the most ridiculous thing imaginable, because they haven't been a band for 25 years. And now the movie is out and the success that had eluded them for forever has happened.' Pavements is in cinemas from Friday, July 11th
ABC News
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Chit Chat: Merpire on new album Milk Pool, writing horny songs, and her 'chin music' guilty pleasure
Merpire is charming us with a very accurate, impression of a crow. The occasion? The independent singer-songwriter's second album, Milk Pool. The impetus, however, is the lush flora and fauna surrounding her at the Pioneer Women's Memorial Garden, a location she hand-picked for this interview after describing the record as a "garden of possibility". As Merpire, Rhiannon Atkinson-Howatt is a well-connected figure in the Melbourne/Naarm music scene. She co-founded the COVID-era streaming event ISOL-AID, was one half of indie-pop duo Wilson's Prom, and lately seems to be the go-to name when touring artists need a local support act. As evidenced by her crow mimicry, she also has a great sense of humour, which feeds into songs that are at once playful yet mature, and very relatable. Those qualities are all over the new album. Like her 2021 debut, Double J Feature Album Simulation Ride, it exhibits her knack for hooky indie-rock that's emotive, memorable and comforting. To mark its release, we caught up with Merpire for a chin wag that took in second albums, horny songs, and "chin music". Milk Pool is a couple of things. It tells you my more serious side of approach to music, as well as humorous side. This is more for millennials and above, but if anyone remembers the episode of The Simpsons when they get a pool and Bart has broken his leg. He's sitting by the pool and he's asking, 'Sign my cast? Sign my cast?' And no-one signs it. And then Milhouse goes past and he goes to write his name but he's looking at the pool and writes 'Milpool'. That's just me. When I think too seriously about music, I have to counteract it with something that I find funny. So, there's that side of the album name. But then also it's representative of how approaching making music is for me, by reminding myself just to wade into the unknown, like a pool of milk. You can't see where you're stepping. It could be scary, but you just have to trust that you're gonna carry yourself through and find something to write. I love me some sunflowers. There's some happiness, a couple of songs that are more about being open like a sunflower and welcoming friendship. But then maybe there's some also dark-petalled flowers as well. Dark-petalled flowers!? I don't know my flowers, how embarrassing! Maybe dark roses. I think to be easier on myself, in terms of everything it takes releasing an album. From writing it and recording it, coming up with the visuals, maybe having marketing on board and radio, plugging it, all that kind of stuff. You're always learning how to do each of those things a little bit better, or more in line with yourself. Also, an approach I want to take once the songs are out is to really let them be however and whatever other people need. That might mean interpreting the lyrics or the emotions in their own way, and I think that's the beauty of music that I'm remembering. Favourite second album by another artist? Maybe Chutes Too Narrow by The Shins. Lots of good songs on the second album! Definitely the development phase. It makes it a bit easier the fact that when I write, I'm already dreaming up the scenes and what the visuals could look like. I do really need that time with the songs and to walk around gardens like this and just kind of soak up my surrounds. I love TV and movies; there's not a moment that goes by where if I'm with a friend, I'm like, 'Imagine if there was a scene just now and then this thing happened, and then, like, the camera came over here and we were like, whoa!' That's just how my brain works. It's easier directing videos when I can see angles and cuts in my mind. I think the hardest part though is when I have a limited budget, so then I have to limit the visuals. But that's also exciting to see what can come from almost nothing. I guess maybe it was a bit more of a tag line for people to be like, 'Oh, I better listen to this if it's the horniest song she's ever written.' And then with 'Bigger', even hornier, they're like 'What?!' That's how I wanted that to happen. So, it was a bit sneaky, but I always knew that. I found it easy to write about because I think as much as early crushes are so difficult and challenging, they're also so exciting. Especially for someone that writes. I was really inspired by the first fantasy novel that I read by Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind, from the Kingkiller Chronicles. If anyone wants to delve into that realm, not a particularly sexy trilogy of books. But there are little sexy moments, and that's kind of what inspired me to think back to having big crushes and all the feelings that happen around that. Chin music! [Laughs] OK, it's anything that requires your chin to sing like this [juts chin out]. Like the bands Live, Pearl Jam or Creed. [Begins singing the latter's hit, 'Higher'] The 'ers' have to be right there in the back of your throat. That's my guilty pleasure, rocking out to those songs. They're my karaoke songs every single time. That's chin music. Who's next? I would love to play with Middle Kids one day. They're on the bucket list. That's probably the top one. I would say. I'd also love to play with Angie McMahon again, also Julia Jacklin. And Armlock — they're really, really cool. Oh my goodness, there's so many! I recently did some backing vocals for Bec Sykes' album launch. I just hit her up on Instagram and said, 'Hey, I really love your songs. I'm always singing harmonies to them. I know you've got an album launch coming up. Would you be so kind as to let me sing some if you needed them?' It just so happened that her backing vocalists had gone overseas, so she was like, 'Yeah, please.' And it was such a pleasure. It's probably going to be dog related, or babies getting pushed over by a dog. Or it'd be something really unhinged like… Actually, I know! Someone had made an imaginary dream rollercoaster. It takes you through the whole ride as if you're in a seat. At the top of the video, it's got the velocity you're travelling at, slightly increasing it by the end of it. You're travelling at like, 10 Gs. Then, it's going crazy — it goes through the core of the Earth and it's just stupid. But it's very funny. Milk Pool is out now. Catch Merpire at the following dates: Friday August 15— Junk Bar: Turrbal Jagera Land, Brisbane Saturday August 16 — Lazy Thinking: Gadigal Land, Sydney Sunday August 17 — Smiths Alternative: Ngunnawal, Canberra Thursday August 21 — Merri Creek Tavern: Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung, Melbourne (sold out) Thurs August 28 — Merri Creek Tavern: Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung, Melbourne (sold out)
