Pavement Steers Clear of Mainstream Traffic

In the press biography that accompanied the release of Pavement’s third album, “Wowee Zowee,” last April, the group’s leader, Stephen Malkmus, philosophized, “Do you like progress? Not me. Progress is predictable and predictability involves science. I want nothing to do with science. Life is not a chemistry test.”

Coming from a band that operates on a dynamic of irony and ambiguity, that almost amounts to a clear-cut manifesto on the theme of career versus artistry.

“Yeah, I’m never gonna live down that bio,” says Malkmus, who’s obviously had the subject brought up before. “I just wrote that. It’s kind of a leg pull.”

Now that sounds more like the Pavement that has kept its followers fascinated for six years with a blend of contradictions. The group, which headlines the Troubadour tonight, is as evocative as it is elusive, offering bittersweet, folk-simple melodies and rich guitar textures that are constantly challenged by its dissonant impulses.

“We just sort of wanted to be just kind of--deviant,” Malkmus said during a phone interview this week from Tokyo, where Pavement was wrapping up a Japanese tour.

“I thought on ‘Wowee Zowee’ it was kind of deviant for us just to mess around and just do whatever we wanted. That’s what music’s about though--it’s about freedom, and we’re free to do whatever we want.

“And that’s the most fun thing, because in most of our Western society . . . for the most part everything’s pretty straight. You’re not free. You’re pretty repressed, and that’s why we dig this music so much.”

Pavement’s second full album, 1994’s “Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain,” with its catchy single “Cut Your Hair,” crystallized the band’s powers and brought them perilously close to the mainstream. The knottier “Wowee Zowee” has returned Pavement to a more comfortable stratum of the indie-rock scene.

“We’re pretty well established in our own way, so it’s hard for me to think about those pressures of success or something,” said Malkmus, 29, a Stockton native who formed the group with fellow singer-guitarist Scott Kannberg in 1989. “We don’t have to play by those rules, and I’m grateful for that.

“We have an audience, I guess, and that’s all we’ve ever wanted. And I think we can keep one without having a ‘Crooked Rain’-type media overkill.

“Because I mean, face it, unless you’re just totally fanatical about staying in the public eye--there’s so much competition for people’s time that you just might as well give up. You’ve got to hire a publicist. I don’t have time to do that. I want to have a normal life, a wife and kids one day, so I can’t do that.”

This resistance to the standard career track has earned Pavement the image of “slacker band” and has even been interpreted as indifference--tags that Malkmus doesn’t enjoy.

“That’s pretty bad, the ‘indifferent’ thing. I don’t think we’re exactly indifferent. . . . I think that’s become sort of a media thing and a way to fit us in. Because we’re kind of like Blues Traveler, you know--normal guys. So they got to say something.”

* Pavement plays tonight at the Troubadour, 9081 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood, 8 p.m. Sold out. (310) 276-6168.