Perfect Sound Forever: The Story of Pavement

It’s somehow fitting that Pavement, the banner-carrying indie-rock band formed in Stockton in the 1980s by a pair of young import-record freaks, gets the trade-paperback bio treatment from an English journo. That means the geography may be slightly suspect, but there’s enough train spotting going on to keep the diehard fans happy with obscurities and minutiae. Jovanovic’s writing style is workmanlike, in the way those ghost-written one-page bios that record labels send out to accompany new releases are workmanlike. But he interviewed the band and its associates extensively; this isn’t something slapped together from secondary sources. The result is a somewhat-inside look at the evolution of a band that surprised nearly everybody. Lots of groovy visuals, too.