Pavement on the lawn: Seminal '90s band tests its comeback outdoors

A group as devoted to entropy as Pavement was and is has no business putting together a career compilation that hangs together as well as "Quarantine the Past."

Released a full decade after the band's last studio album, and as part of a comeback tour that already brought the group to Chicago this summer for the Pitchfork Music Festival, it's one of the best releases of the year - and that's no embarrassment in a season that has also produced landmark new albums by Arcade Fire, Vampire Weekend, Spoon, the Black Keys and Elizabeth Cook.

Now, after its well-received set to bring Pitchfork to a suitably scruffy and climactic close, Pavement is returning to Chicago for an even sterner test: the pristine Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago's Millennium Park, where it plays at 7 p.m. Monday. The venue's lovely atmosphere and top-flight acoustics - with speakers hanging from the distinctive metal latticework above the lawn - should highlight the contradictions Pavement thrives on: its crack musicianship combined with its awkward grace akimbo (a partial product of the way the scattered members would often get together to record an album without much rehearsal), along with chief songwriter Stephen Malkmus' conversational lyrics that nonetheless sometimes approach the best beat poetry.

It could produce a legendary concert, the way it did with Wilco a few years ago, if the weather - and the band - are accommodating. It could, however, result in something of a flop, as the group realistically is still coming off a 10-year hiatus as a performing unit. Yet that tension is what has always made Pavement's music crackle.

In many ways, Pavement was the signature band of the '90s, perhaps because like the decade overall the group defied easy categorization. The band emerged fully formed with "Slanted and Enchanted" in 1992, and a listener had to abandon all preconceptions to get its angular rhythms, offhand melodies and nonsense verse at all. Pavement wasn't punk by any means, certainly not second-generation grunge punk, and it wasn't hard-core, although it could thrash with the best of them when the mood struck (as on "Wowee Zowee"). Committed to dissonance as sound and metaphor, it never wallowed in it like Sonic Youth. Pavement never much aspired to the groove either, the way, say, Luna did. And it eschewed the eclectic rock-critic formalism of a Yo La Tengo, even as it reveled in sounds like the Rickenbacker 12-string guitar riff that opens "Date w/IKEA" on "Brighten the Corners" as sheer sonic texture.

Just so, if Pavement made its audience give up preconceptions, its music continues to reward a listener's awareness - a neat trick to pull off, and one essential to postmodern art of any sort. Pavement always sounds like Pavement, rejecting the sense of development displayed by groups like Talking Heads, yet never repeating itself, so that each album sounds distinct. That's one of the pleasures of "Quarantine the Past," the way it opens with "Gold Soundz" from what I'd argue is the group's peak, 1994's melodic "Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain," and then flits back and forth from album to album in a way that brings out new resonances in the songs. Pavement closes with the R.E.M. homage "Unseen Power of the Picket Fence" (a welcome curiosity from the 1993 "V/A No Alternative" compilation) and the coda "Fight This Generation," which comes as close as anything to defining the way Pavement typified its era by rejecting it.

The songs still sound great, as "Quarantine" makes clear, and timeless, which oddly enough is what makes them so peculiar to the '90s. Pavement was sophisticated, knowing, hyper-aware - all naively so sometimes - gritty, rocking, but never in a comfortable, conventional way. Although capable of anger ("No big hair!"), Malkmus is more a dispassionate observer than emotional barometer, always keeping the audience at arm's length.

Otherwise, the group, for all its disparate elements, was always a group, rejecting rock-star portraits so that it always seemed a faceless amalgamation. Malkmus might have attracted most of the attention as lead singer and songwriter, but even he has never come close to attaining the brilliance of Pavement as a solo artist, not even after adding Sleater-Kinney's Janet Weiss (the best drummer on the planet) to his backing group, the Jicks.

Pavement's music always seemed in some way a happy accident, an aesthetic it shared with Bob Dylan's one-take ethos as expressed most purely on the complete "Basement Tapes," and Monday the group tries to recreate that serendipity. It could be one of the best shows of the season - or not. In any case, it won't be just another cash-grab farewell-tour quickie reunion. That was never the Pavement way.