Stephen Malkmus was throat-clearing. The Pavement frontman’s 2001 solo debut might as well have been a sixth LP from the band that made him an indie-rock legend; Pavement can even be found workshopping material from it in the Slow Century documentary. It’s a good album, but those quirky little guitar-pop songs were less like the start of something new and more like punctuation on the catalog Malkmus had been building for the past decade.