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Of all the Pavement albums, Terror Twilight is the least “Pavement-like” and of all the songs on Terror Twilight, “…And Carrot Rope” is the least Pavement-like and as such as a song it perfectly sums up the band.

To some extent, only Pavement fans would follow that logic, in fact Pavement were to the quantum physics of the alternative scene in the Nineties, in that if you said you understood them, you didn’t. Like the Spherical Cow, that’s the kind of comment that only really appeals to those who get excited by and can spot Star Trek references and in-jokes in other films. That’s exactly who Pavement were.

Terror Twilight wasn’t so much a Pavement album as a statement of intent from Stephen Malkmus on his solo career, but it was less noticeable than in most bands because Pavement had never really stood still. From their early days trying to recreate the Fall for the American College Radio Scene, each new Pavement album brought a new direction from the band, except with a sound and style that could only ever be “Pavement.”

Few bands actually go on to have their own adjective. Even with some of the better, more successful bands, their influences and roots define them more than their own output. Nirvana always owed that bit too much debt to the Pixies and the Replacements, who themselves owed much to Big Star, who themselves owed much to the Beatles and so on. While early on, Pavement’s records definitely owed a lot to The Fall, this soon disappeared when Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain was released. From then on, there was no holding them back and by the time their last album together, Terror Twilight, was released they had come to be seen as one of the most important Alternative bands of the Nineties and band that could only be described by, “well, you know, sounds like Pavement.”

When Terror Twilight came to be, every Pavement fan knew this was there last and so were probably in a forgiving mood when it didn’t at first meet the heights of their previous releases. But at its heart it was a fun, light-hearted send off that really didn’t take itself seriously. While the sound was far more pop orientated than any Pavement album to date, this couldn’t care less attitude, along with quality output, seemed to be the only consistent thing about the band over their career.

You have to put the album into context. It was a farewell and a final salute before the guys (who all lived in separate States) got back to their family lives. Then right at the end of that album comes a shining moment of pop perfection. The title alone hints at the final fare the well, a kind of “oh and by the way, here’s Carrot Rope.”

This was still an age, probably now forgotten in the last few years, where track order was important. More so in the CD era when albums were listened to in the entirety without the need to turn it over, so the order of tracks needed to keep a listener interested. The first had to be the hook, especially for those who had taken a gamble on the purchase, it had to put you at ease and keep you interested. Then the order of the other songs couldn’t be too slapdash, you couldn’t have too many slower numbers together, the mix had to be right with the faster numbers. But the ending had to make you want to hit the repeat button. As any bloke who has ever tried to woo a potential mate with a compilation tape/CD will tell you, this is not an easy process. You can whittle down songs to the eleven or so you want, but hitting that perfect order, that takes time.

While it might be old age more than anything else, but when you can pick and chose those songs on an album that you like and ignore the rest in a purchase, there is little need for so much attention to the order of tracks and that’s a pity. The bizarre thing about …And Carrot Rope is that while undeniably great, it didn’t invoke the repeat button feeling. Instead, it was the perfect sign off to a fond farewell. Rather than feel “I must listen to that all over again”, you were left with that waving off the relatives at the airport feeling. It was really nice and we must do it again soon.

On any other album that would be frustrating, but this was a goodbye so it was more than fitting and it didn’t actually prevent you from playing the album over again. Just that if you didn’t, you still felt satisfied that all was well with the world, that George Bailey has finally realised it really is a wonderful life.

The old Pavement tones are still there in spades with the record. There’s the obscure, completely made up references such as what exactly is a Carrot Rope? The thing about Pavement lyrics is that there’s no point really trying to figure it out, while you may think you’ve found the answer, when you listen to the song in full you realise that most of it just doesn’t fit into your analysis of the song. Daytime TV psychics are more accurate in predictions than anyone who tries to figure out a Pavement song.

There are also the slight innuendos for those who have a bit of filth in their minds. “Hey little boy would you like to see what’s in my pocket or not?” can take on so many meanings that you wonder if there isn’t something wrong with you rather than the lyrics. And like all good Pavement tracks there’s the Anglophilic references that occasionally creep in, “the wicket keeper is down” has no place coming from the mouth of anyone outside of Surrey or Yorkshire.

So on paper, it’s a standard Pavement track, but on listen it isn’t. The fond farewell is encapsulated buy the opening verse where every band member gets the chance to add to the harmonies. Not unusual for most bands, but for Pavement involvement form other band members tended to be limited to squeaks, squeals, screams and yells, here even Mark Ibold gets to sing.

To some extent it’s a pity that the harmonies don’t last longer than the first verse, but maybe that’s how it should be. Not that this gives Malkmus too much of the spotlight, but that too much of a new and good thing might have been too much for this last track on their last album.

There is no definitive point to start with Pavement, you either get them or you don’t, so irrespective of which track you begin with it’ll be for you or it won’t. But sometimes it can be best just to start at the very end and to work backwards. While taken out of its context, this song may not have as much meaning to the uninitiated, that history cannot detract from what is a genuine, cheerful little pop classic.

You just know in your heart of hearts, that it’s not really a goodbye, just a see you around…maybe.

Even bastards get to lament and when they do, this song is for them.

Those of a certain age always look down on the new generations and wonder, in a pitiful way, whether they’ll get to experience music just as they did when they were younger. The answer is usually yes of course they will. But when you get to an age where any young kid in a tracksuit becomes such a threat to your own imagined safety that you effectively spend the time it takes until you get near to them, plotting your ninja-like slaughtering of them if they try anything, any small issue you can belittle them with is important.

So there is a question whether the yoof of today will ever have those moments in the bedroom when for about four minutes the world stops. Those moments where you’re busying yourself and have on the alternative music radio programme on in the background and then occasionally a new song comes on that just makes you drop everything. I remember well when Dollar Bill did that when it got its first radio airing and it wasn’t just me, there was serious talk about that one song in school the next day.

Now of course, not only would we have heard it, we’d have downloaded it and we’d be posting messages, texting friends and have it as our ring tone sung by a toddler in the space of thirty seconds and by the end of the song we’d already be sick of it. This isn’t to say that things are worse today, just that some aspects of the romance have gone: the discovery, the long wait to discuss it with fellow discoverers, the long wait for it to be released, the trip into town to purchase it, the long bus ride home reading each and every word and credit before you get to listen to it.

Why is all that important? Because at its heart Dollar Bill is one of the most romantic and fragile songs written in the last twenty years. Romance is important and not just the rose-tinted romance of discovery it’s also one of the reasons why the Screaming Trees never quite became as successful as they deserved.

At the time when Sweet Oblivion was released, the Screaming Trees had been around for a while. Sweet Oblivion came at the time of the huge interest in all things Seattle and guitar based, but they had been around in various formats since the mid eighties. The main problem is that they were possibly too good, at least Mark Lanegan was.

At a time when the kids reclaimed music, as it were, the original rock and roll and punk spirit was very much alive. By that, it meant music that you could do yourself. That you could get together with a few friends and have just enough talent amongst you to play something that was largely in tune. There was no need for serious vocals or vocal ability. There was no need for huge guitar talent, it was nice for sure, but as long as you’d mastered power chords and could tune the guitar down half an octave you were in. The widdly widdly solos of Eighties hair rock no longer applied, it could just be noise or fuzz of screech. That was where the connection was.

Place into that not only guitarists with more than enough talent to play proper chords, but also a singer with a voice that had more soul and heartbreak in it than the combined talents of most of old  Motown.  While impressive, there was no way your average acne-marked teenager was ever going to replicate a Screaming Trees song. Musically and lyrically, they were superb without ever sounding over produced, but that was half the problem.

The other issue was that while they could rock, as was the law at the time, Lanegan was never better than on quieter and more soulful songs. He could belt out the rock songs, but it was when the acoustic guitars came out that you really felt the full force of his vocals. It was only natural that at the end of the Trees’ lifetime Lanegan would gravitate towards a more folky, blues and country style.

The upshot is that this song was just so out of place in the time that it became an instant classic. It would never date, it wasn’t grounded in the sound of the early Nineties and had none of the that overly fuzzed production or the Albini influenced stripped down and amateur for the sake of sounding stripped down and amateur. The song was produced exactly as it should sound.

While describing it as a bastard’s lament may be a bit harsh, there’s far more introspection to it than that, it isn’t your typical “she up and left me” number. Lou Barlow was perfecting the art of producing “why don’t girls like me” material for all college boys considered themselves as “sensitive” and “thinkers” mainly because they hadn’t figured out that obsessing over Barlow’s lyrics, lack of sunlight and poor personal hygiene were probably the main reasons why they weren’t getting girlfriends. But here was Lanegan letting us know exactly why he’s left on his own, he did the damage, he knows that and he knew it while he was doing the damage, he just can’t help himself messing everything up. The aspect of a self-destructive protagonist with nobody to blame but himself just works. It works in film, it works in literature and here it works in music. We know he’s a dickhead and he deserves what he got, but we can’t help liking him and feeling sorry for him.

If you’ve never heard any Screaming Trees or Mark Lanegan, then start here. Wait for the casual, melodic two chord intro (that owes much to Lennon’s Imagine) to wash over you as Lanegan quietly hums over the intro. It’s certainly a great hook to start a song, but for Lanegan virgins, it’s what happens after twenty four seconds when this gruff, lamentful voice comes in with “Torn like and old Dollar Bill.”

Right there in that one line you have more imagery than anything anyone else was writing at the time. It typifies the sheer superiority of Americana over anything that could be produced elsewhere. “Torn like and old pound note” just wouldn’t work, “Torn like a fiver”? Like American town and place names just work in songs, you could imagine quite clearly a battered old dollar bill, ripped and torn through years of passing through hands, wallets, pockets, bags and tills. What better way to state just how much you’ve messed up?

As Lanegan goes through the list of thinks he did, but didn’t mean to, but couldn’t help himself, so the song gradually picks up and the guitars get heavier. The bass and the drums become more pronounced to the point where the break reaches the perfect rock tone for beating the wall and reaching for the whiskey as you wallow in self-pity and self-hatred.  Lanegan picks up the intensity with his vocals yelling, “I don’t wanna hurt ya, that’s all I seem to do. Don’t wanna desert ya, that’s all I seem to do.” And just as the whiskey runs out, so does the self-loathing and the song brings us back down to the gentleness of the intro and Lanegan signing off with that same line “Torn like an old Dollar Bill.”

And after just over four minutes, so are you.

A couple of years ago I heard novelist Ian McEwan talking about his novel Saturday, lamenting the fact that work doesn’t crop up in novels these days. Characters do everything in the modern novel, other than work - or if they do, there’s no particular detail paid to the minutiae of their trade, unless, of course, they’re detectives in which case we get to hear too much.

Try looking for mentions of mortgages in the modern pop/rock song and you’ll hit the same brick wall. Foreclosures, or even dissapointing returns on pork bellies from the chicago market - something which one is sure that the investment minded songwriter, like M. Jagger, is probably more than a little aware of - are noticeably absent from the classics, so bear with me as we put together a tenuous play-list with which to confront the credit crunch.

R.E.M. It’s the end of the world as we know it
Best played over your morning coffee as you check to see whether the bank in which your savings are held has gone bust, or as you check to see how much your variable rate mortgage is going to cost you this month.

Jenny Owen Youngs’ What the Fuck was I thinking
With a slight modification, it could work as a soundtrack when you’re trying to think exactly why you signed up to a particular mortgage.

Jimmy Eat World Futures
Perhaps the only song in the list to fit the tag without adjustment, Futures hits a hard-rock nerve on the Bush administration zeitgeist which has helped create the conditions to change to cost of living for millions worldwide

“Hey now, you can’t keeping saying endlessly
My darling, how long until this affects me?
Say hello to good times
Trade up for the fast ride
We close our eyes while the nickel and dime take the streets completely”

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Brother my cup is empty
Let’s get melodramatic, and imagine that things really do go over the edge. Cave’s begging song is no shrinking-violet, but filled with indignation and menace. Best played, at ear-shattering volume, to any banker you may know.

O brother, my cup is empty
And I havent got a penny
For to buy no more whiskey
I have to go home [...]

O my friend, my only brother
Do not let the party grieve
So throw a dollar onto the bar
Now kiss my ass and leave

And finally, for a glimmer of hope, Cake’s version of Gloria Gaynor’s I will Survive, for the main because, unlike Gaynor’s version, there’s no doubt in the cake version that the subject of the song will indeed survive, and is completely over the object of his misplaced affections. Hopefully an anthem to be adopted by economists in their droves abandoning the neo-liberal ship.

In Daniel Orozco’s brilliant short story Orientation, there’s a moment when - during an introduction to an office environment - the narrative slips into the startling:

“Anika Bloom sits in that cubicle. Last year, while reviewing quarterly reports in a meeting with Barry Hacker, Anika Bloom’s left palm began to bleed. She fell into a trance, stared into her hand,

and told Barry Hacker when and how his wife would die. We laughed it off. She was, after all, a new employee. But Barry Hacker’s wife is dead.”

I’ve kept the Killers at arms length until now, not entirely unimpressed by their wholesome keyboard flavoured rock, and annoyed at myself for endlessly humming the trite but mercilessly catchy ‘I’ve got soul, but I’m not a soldier’. Listening to When You Were Young, though, my ears picked up at the end of the first verse, as things went strange and the best line in recent pop history came out:

“He doesn’t look a thing like Jesus, but he talks like a gentleman”

That line is the pop equivalent of Orozco’s story, flowing out of the song naturally but completely
out of place at the same time, for all the world like a threshold - inviting you into a skewed and
interesting world. On hearing it I was captured, as effectively as when in countless films a van
screeches up with its side door already sliding open to devour the caught-off guard protagonist to be bundled off to an uncertain fate (most shockingly used recently in Brian De Palma’s redacted - if
you’ve got the stomach for it).

All of which is to say that I’m hooked, despite the modest beginings of the song where
the rhythm section pounds along, grounded in a simple, determined, heart-quickening rutting beat, for all the world as if they were not the world’s quietest (in terms of behaviour) pop band but AC/DC kicking off a Friday night bar-room brawl. The warm fuzzy guitars and keyboards take off some of the edge, but only some, keeping it the right side of salvation.

If they’re tight, singer Brandon Flowers is loose, loose, so loose on this song - leaving
grand-canyon sized gaps for listeners to read between the lines in a tale that’s certainly about
temptation, may well be about sex (of a number of kinds) and profanity, and is coloured in with the
big broad American brushstrokes of devils and redemption, highways and hurricanes.

Like Orozco’s story, you feel like you’ve been given information, that you’re following the plot, but when you stop for a minute, it’s all too apparent that nothing is clear and the waters are muddied. Who, for example is the song being sung to? To the simplest of questions - is it adressed to a man or a woman? - there is no discernible answer (of course, if you watch Mtv you’ll be supplied with ready-made answers - but they’re imposed upon the song, rather than being integral).

It’s booming and anthemic, but in the best tradition of ‘big’ music it provides no answers, just a brilliant tune, great lines and ambiguities that are stadium-sized.