or better or worse, we here at Stylus, in all of our autocratic consumer-crit greed, are slaves to timeliness. A record over six months old is often discarded, deemed too old for publication, a relic in the internet age. That's why each week at Stylus, one writer takes a look at an album with the benefit of time. Whether it has been unjustly ignored, unfairly lauded, or misunderstood in some fundamental way, we aim with On Second Thought to provide a fresh look at albums that need it.

This 1993 disc compiles all of Pavement’s pre- Slanted & Enchanted seven inches and EPs, including "Slay Tracks", "Demolition Plot J-7", "Perfect Sound Forever", and "Summer Babe", plus a couple of compilation tracks from their earliest stages. This is Pavement in all their dissonant, embryonic fury. Noisier than Slanted, more obtuse than Wowee Zowee, these long-out-of-print discs were a veritable hipster haven, until the world got to hear them, that is. Then they were just pretentious.

The moral: hipsters suck, Pavement rule. Take heed, kids, fuck The Fall, buy American.