Album of the Week: Pavement – Hecklers Choice: Big Gums and Heavy Lifters
Best Of and Greatest Hits compilations are often maligned by serious music fans and collectors, often dismissed in favour of an artist’s studio albums and frequently written off as record-label cash-ins. Yet every so often, one transcends that reputation and becomes essential such as Buzzcocks’ Singles Going Steady, Joy Division’s and New Order’s Substance, The Beatles’ 1, Bob Marley’s Legend, Madonna’s Immaculate Collection. While the streaming era has dulled the impact of traditional compilations, its playlists now filling that introductory role, they remain one of the quickest, most accessible ways to understand what a band is all about.
The wonderfully titled Hecklers Choice: Big Gums & Heavy Lifters is Pavement’s second compilation, following 2010’s career-spanning Quarantine the Past. With just 12 tracks, it’s a more streamlined affair, sharp, and focused, and in that succinctness lies its strength. It does exactly what a great compilation should do, it offers newcomers a perfect entry point and gives long-time fans a tidy set of essentials, with great replay value.
Where Quarantine the Past felt like a very curated choice, Hecklers Choice (as its title implies) seems built around the Pavement tracks listeners gravitate toward most. Crucially, it’s sequenced beautifully, a key factor when stitching together material from across eras, and it moves effortlessly from the band’s punky, lo-fi beginnings to their softer detours and on to the cleaner, more refined work of their late 90s releases. All the songs a casual listener could name are here, radio-ready alt-rock classics like Cut Your Hair, Stereo, Gold Soundz, and Shady Lane, plus Crooked Rain’s Unfair and the classic debut single Summer Babe (Winter Version), arguably the greatest American indie-rock single of the ’90s. There’s the lovely, melancholic Here from Slanted & Enchanted (surely the closest Pavement ever came, in their own inimitable ironic way, to a lighter-in-the-air moment), the excellent Spit on a Stranger from Terror Twilight, and, of course, the now iconic double viral sensation Harness Your Hopes, once a forgotten B-side, now their most streamed song by a mile.
While many Pavement fans could put together countless, alternative 12 track playlists that offer a way into one of the indie-rock’s greatest, most consistent catalogues, you’d struggle to find a tighter or more satisfying snapshot of Pavement’s genius available on one record than these 12 cuts. For that alone, Hecklers Choice: Big Gums & Heavy Lifters — A Pavement Collection is an undeniable triumph.
