Terror Twilight, released by Pavement on June 8, 1999, was the band’s fifth and final studio album release. It has a ten song tracklist, with “The Hexx” being the longest song at five minutes and 35 seconds.
The album features twangy guitar riffs and a variety of different uses of sound sampling, which adds to the overall grooviness and perhaps even eeriness of the album. The songs feature a feeling of impending danger within them, like a ticking clock. Songs like “Cream of Gold” and “Platform Blues” feature emotional screaming that forms a sense of doom, as well as the bashing down of the strumming on the guitar.
The opening song of the album, “Spit on a Stranger.” It is a relatively good song and it became one of the band’s most listened to songs on music streaming platforms like Spotify.
Further down the list of songs, “Cream of Gold” is more dramatic. It begins with a dissonant twang of a guitar being plucked with more pronounced emotion being emitted from the singer through his lyrics, like “I dream in beige/ Why’d you leave me so far now?” While the song is mainly nonsense, with the band’s keen sense of rhyming being a huge part of their songwriting, it invokes a more passionate feeling through the singer’s tone.
The last track on the album, “Carrot Rope,” is a more groovy feature on the album and is a tad more eccentric. The track begins with spoken words of two singers speaking over one another in an almost offbeat way. Again, it is one of the calmer songs on the album.
Overall, I would give this album an eight out of ten. I love indie and alternative bands and Pavement is one of my favorites. Their songs are complex and have wonderful instrumentation.
