Brighten the Corners feels a bit like the forgotten Pavement album. Slanted & Enchanted was the brilliant low-fi debut; Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain proved they could clean up well and was full of 120 Minutes earworms and snarky arrogance; Wowee Zowee was the weird one, too long but a favorite among the heads, devotees and the band's percussionists; and Terror Twilight was the last burning embers, an album made with an in-demand producer (Nigel Godrich) that felt like the start of Stephen Malkmus' solo career. Brighten the Corners was the other one.
As many others have said, Brighten the Corners also seems like it should've come immediately after Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. It's the more obvious follow-up, coming in at a tight 45 minutes with just-polished enough production and loads of hooky songs with earworm choruses, while still maintaining that shaggy dog feel you want from Pavement. The wig-out that is Wowee Zowee -- a spotlight draft dodge that felt like an intentional shot in the foot -- may just have been the kind of One Last Wild Night that leads a group, who were all hovering around 30, to make a relatively sober but still wonderfully loose record like this.
Feeling like it was time to straighten up and fly right, respectively, the band did something they had never done before when making a record: rehearse ahead of time. After two weeks of working out the music, they headed to Mitch Easter's home studio in North Carolina to record with Bryce Goggin who had mixed Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. Easter, who co-produced the first two R.E.M. albums (among other things), ended up working with the band for a week while Goggin was away but he brushes off the co-producer claims that circulated at the time. "I don’t remember what the credits are," Easter told The Fader in 2008, "but that was a very much band-produced record, if not a co-production between them and Bryce." After recording in North Carolina, the album was finished in NYC with frontman Malkmus finishing the lyrics and the band recording vocals.