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1. Pavement “Slanted & Enchanted”
2. Pavement “Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain”
3. Pavement “Wowee Zowee”

Bandcamp is an online music platform used largely by independent artists and record labels to stream songs and sell merchandise. It’s also a vibrant virtual community teeming with interesting sounds just waiting to be discovered. Each week, I’ll highlight three releases available on the site that are well worth your time and attention. If you find something you dig, please consider supporting the artist with a purchase.

This week, it’s a very special episode of Bandcampin’, because all five albums from Pavement — the best band ever, of course — popped up on the site earlier this week. So today, we’re focusing on Pavement.

Pavement

“Slanted & Enchanted” https://pavement.bandcamp.com/album/slanted-enchanted

“Slanted & Enchanted” is the band’s official debut full-length, a landmark recording of the 1990s, a monument to fuzzed-out slackerism and, according to Rolling Stone, the 135th best album of all time. (“The quintessential American indie-rock record,” the magazine called it.) Even back in the dark ages of the pre-internet, advance promotional copies of “Slanted & Enchanted” made Pavement the buzziest band in all the land thanks to their somehow aloof-yet-approachable combo of jangling guitars, disheveled rhythms, absurdist lyrics and DIY vibes.

“Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain” https://pavement.bandcamp.com/album/crooked-rain-crooked-rain

The follow-up to “Slanted & Enchanted” is sunny and sly, and it showcases Pavement’s easy tunefulness through perfect guitar-pop songs like the effervescent “Gold Soundz,” the twangy “Range Life” and the Weezer-ish “Cut Your Hair,” which landed the band an MTV hit. Where “Slanted” is a paragon of indie culture, “Crooked Rain” is rooted in classic rock, updated with a ‘90s wink and a nod. Both of Pavement’s first two albums are five-star, all-time classics, and you can’t go wrong with either. But if you’re looking for an entry point to the band, “Crooked Rain” is the choice.

“Wowee Zowee” https://pavement.bandcamp.com/album/wowee-zowee

Pavement always had a complicated relationship with potential popularity and were prone to self-sabotage. The best example of that is the band’s sprawling third album, “Wowee Zowee,” which spends 18 tracks zigzagging through a minefield of pop oddities, noisy jams and genre experiments. There are several tracks (“Grounded,” “AT&T”) that sound like natural extensions of “Crooked Rain,” but for the most part, “Wowee Zowee” feels like a recoil in the face of mainstream acceptance. For some, this may be a feature, not a bug.