Quarantine the Past

Pavement have a fairly small catalog-- five full-length albums and a handful of EPs, plus a compilation of early singles. Over the past decade, their B-sides, radio sessions, and assorted rarities have been repackaged into a series of excellent reissues, which has made it easy to be a Pavement completist without blowing a lot of cash. It's all very accessible, but it's not easy to know where to start. Quarantine the Past, the first-ever Pa vement retrospective compilation, solves this problem by providing a cheap and easy entry point to the band that represents the breadth of their songbook. The best-known songs are featured-- "Cut Your Hair", "Gold Soundz", "Here", "Shady Lane", "Spit on a Stranger"-- but so are concert staples, fan favorites, and at least a couple of curveballs. The sequence is non-chronological, zig-zagging through the catalog and evenly distributing the obvious classics throughout the running order.

In an era touting Seattle grunge, west coast punk and ska revivals, and the unseemly rebirth of shock rock and emo, it's hard to believe much else was happening in rock music in the early to mid '90s. Each movement had a mascot that launched a thousand bands - Nirvana, Green Day, Sublime, Marilyn Manson - but who was holding the torch for good old indie rock?