Alright, local Pavement fans: If you want your local rock historian’s take on the new record from Stephen Malkmus, look no further than the recent issue of Rolling Stone magazine that features folk-pop musician Jack Johnson’s handsome mug on the front cover. Flip to the reviews in the back of the mag, find Love is a Mixtape author Rob Sheffield’s name and the four-and-a-half star ranking and knock yourself out. Finished? Good, isn’t it?
 Litterbugs: Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks sully up your ears with their messily enjoyable new record, Real Emotional Trash. |
For the rest of you: I’ve never had a firm understanding of the importance of Malkmus or Pavement, his Charlottesville-born rock ensemble that brought a tidal wave of unintelligible adjectives to rock music criticism. (If you look hard enough, you can probably find reviews crediting Malkmus as a father of “college,” “indie,” “lo-fi” and “slacker” rock.) A founder of local music booking collective Tyrannosaurus Rock threw “Summer Babe (Winter Version),” the lead track from Pavement’s first proper album, Slanted and Enchanted, onto a mixtape for me in 2002 and I found a crude, glacial shudder about the track that appealed, but little else. Three years later, I argued to a stalemate over the Pavement record Wowee Zowee with a friend who held the album in contempt for its cloudy lyrics and uneven song composition. And I don’t blame him because, in my very simplistic, pop-loving heart, I think critics anticipated an ingenious output from Pavement and spent too much ink trying to put lackluster records into context. Call them “slacker rock” and I’ll hammer Malkmus for narrative tail-chasing and a stubborn attitude towards melody.
But here’s the catch with Stephen Malkmus: He is the best (and only) person I can think of whose music sounds better the more you listen to other bands. By the time Malkmus’ third record with the Jicks, Face the Truth, was in my hands, I’d become a fan of Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain’s waterfalls of fuzz and mid-dream mumbles, but only because I finally enjoyed the Velvet Underground and My Bloody Valentine. I bought Matador Records’ re-releases of the Pavement catalogue and enjoyed searching for psychedelia and jazz references in the tunes; I treated each album like one big melodic scavenger hunt.
And so I looked forward to the release of Real Emotional Trash, Malkmus’ fourth Jicks effort and the first to put his backing band (notably new drummer Janet Weiss, formerly of Sleater-Kinney) to proper use. The Jicks proved they could be quiet on their last album, but Malkmus isn’t a quiet man; his attention-deficient ramblings are short bursts of inspiration matched only by Zeppelin kick drums and harmonizing lead guitars that sound like Boston butting heads with Pink Floyd, as on lead single “Baltimore” and lead track “Dragonfly Pie.”
The title track of the record stretches past the 10-minute mark on the strength of a propulsive second half, a bit like Velvet Underground’s “Oh! Sweet Nuthin’,” and six of the 10 songs eclipse the five-minute mark. But Malkmus wrangles a few tough-won melodies to the ground on tracks like “We Can’t Help You” and “Hopscotch Willie,” strolling parallel down cracked lyrical sidewalks with reeling guitar solos. Somewhere, a Pavement fanatic and a Top 40 radio listener are holding hands. And while I won’t commit to the fanatics camp just yet, I’ll certainly take another spin with Malkmus’ album while he chases his tail.
