TRIVIAL PURSUITS
Stephen Malkmus and his Jicks skew whimsical on the new Wig Out At Jagbags
 |
| Steven Malkmus has settled in, not down, with the Jicks |
There was a time when Stephen Malkmus, in his unfashionably
fashionable second-hand slacks and rumpled button-down shirts, seemed to stand at
the center of something big, something crucial, something that felt important
in the way that music sometimes does, but that more often applies to figures in
the insular realms of literature and the visual arts. As the dominant voice and
de-facto frontman of Pavement, an oddly configured product of suburban
California, college life at UVA, and a post-grad stint working as a security
guard at NYC’s Whitney Museum of American Art, he embodied an anti aesthetic, a
warped alternative to mainstream alternative-rock that had its roots not in
anger or alienation, but in a kind of bemused irony. If Nirvana marked the resurgence
of punk-rock fury, then Pavement signaled something messier and more elusive —
a clever continuation of the post-punk penchant for a subtler kind of
subversion, or something like that.
The window
for Pavement opened in 1992, with the critically heralded arrival of Slanted
and Enchanted, and just two years later they landed on the Lollapalooza main
stage, which in retrospect seems more than a little absurd. Then again, that
was the same year — 1994 — that Pavement scored a minor alt-rock hit with
“Range Life,” a playfully laid-back, rootsy tune that kinda, sorta poked fun at
Smashing Pumpkins and Stone Temple Pilots, two pillars of alt-rock radio. But,
fittingly enough, Pavement’s moment in the commercial sun pretty much came and
went with ’94’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, the second of just five albums
the band released before collapsing under the weight of their own mystique in
1999.
Since then,
Malkmus, who relocated to the hipster haven of Portland, Oregon, has settled down
— he’s married to artist Jessica Jackson Hutchins and they have two daughters —
without really settling in. With a loose band of enablers called the Jicks,
he’s been steadily recording and releasing solo albums at a rate of one every
two to three years. And, if what once seemed like a cabalistic calling now
comes across more as an odd job description, it probably has as much, if not
more to do with the degree to which the slanted enchantments of twenty years
ago have been normalized and, indeed, ensconce as part of the accepted rock
canon. (I checked and, sure enough, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain is ranked at
#10 in the Rolling Stone 100 best albums of the ’90s.) Not to mention the
fact that, rather than striving to reinvent himself post-Pavement, Stephen
Malkmus has simply gotten really good at being Stephen Malkmus, even if it’s
still not particularly easy to pin down exactly what that entails beyond a few
basic precepts like guitar, bass, and drums; sardonic wordplay; artfully
unpolished production; skewed melodicism; and, oh, just a general and genuine
appreciation for the weirder side of rock.
“Planetary
motion/Circle ’round the sun/United devotion/To the chosen one,” he sings
cryptically in clipped syllables at the start of “Planetary Motion,” the
jauntily dark psychedelic guitar jam that kicks off Wig Out at Jagbags, the
new missive from Malkmus and his Jicks. You could read those lines as a
sarcastic swipe at new-age silliness, or maybe even as Malkmus musing
straightforwardly metaphysical. But it’s every bit as likely that he copped the
notion from an Ancient Astronauts rerun on the History Channel, or that he
was just looking for something to rhyme with the line “I’ve run out of lotion,”
because Malkmus fascination with the arcane is at least equaled, if not
surpassed, by his fondness for the way words sound. So, for example, the title
of the new album is both an accumulation of meaningless syllables and an
oblique allusion to a long forgotten 1987 album by the DC hardcore band Dag
Nasty — Wig Out at Denko’s — an obscure artifact that Malkmus would certainly
have come across as a DJ WTJU during his years at UVA. Either way, Wig Out at
Jagbags is apropos of nothing in particular, other than Malkmus’ penchant for
free association, and the same can probably be said of the “chosen one” in the
opening lines of “Planetary Motion.”
So, what’s
the point? That can be a tough question to answer in the context of Malkmus.
Either you get it or you don’t. His milieu as a wordsmith isn’t really an
acquired taste so much as something that either sits well or doesn’t. In
“Lauriat,” a slack acoustic rocker that echoes the mellow countrified feel of
“Range Life,” Malkmus punctuates the first chorus with an offhand question:
“People look great when they shave, don’t they?” And then, amidst percolating
guitar riffery that brings to mind Jerry Garcia, Malkmus shows his hand, as he
waxes nostalgic and, of course, absurd with this mouthful: “We lived on
Tennyson and venison and the Grateful Dead/It was my honey summer torture
mystic stubble bummer.” Fair enough. But, when it seems like there really isn’t
any destination on the horizon — that we’re all just along for the ride —
Malkmus throws in a line that’s both funny and fitting: “We grew up listening
to the music from the best decade ever/Talking ’bout the Ay-dee-dees.”
The Jicks recorded Wig Out in Berlin, where
Malkmus lived for a couple of years after a brief Pavement reunion in 2010, and
retained former Pavement soundman Remko Shouten to produce it. And, it has some
of the same tossed about, off-the-cuff, everything-is-permitted charm that
Pavement conjured at their best moments. Guitars waver on the edge of discord,
beats stumble over one another from time to time, and Malkmus isn’t shy about
reaching beyond his vocal range here and there, affects that are both annoying
and endearing. And, “Houston Hades,” a song that rests on one of the album’s
more muscular guitar riffs, opens by collapsing in on itself before settling
into a comfortable groove. Whether that’s because Malkmus feels the need to
undermine his own penchant for pop, or it has more to do with the way he’s
innately attuned to hearing music is pretty much beside the point.
There are
some serious moments on Wig Out, and plenty of serious guitar playing. But,
it’s the more whimsical aspects of the album that resonate best, and it’s his
pursuit of the trivial that Malkmus finds his real depth. With a horn section
on board, and a few jazz chords up his sleeve, Malkmus, the outsider artist
with insider cred, plays at preaching to the unconverted in “Chartjunk,” an
uptempo number that opens with the lines “I’ve been you/And I’ve been every
where you’re going,” before heading in the general direction of a Steely
Dan-ish hook that reminds me of “Reelin’ In the Years.” And then, as it heads
into a searingly funny guitar-hero solo, Malkmus reveals what we’ve pretty much
known all along: “Actually, I’m not contractually obliged to care.”
No comments:
Post a Comment