Rockbites: Stephen Malkmus creates a wispy anti-classic

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February 2001 • Rockbites Alternative Daily

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Stephen Malkmus creates a wispy anti-classic
16 February 2001

California raised, Portland based singer/songwriter Stephen Malkmus released his debut solo album this week worldwide. It’s very likely the Pavement record they would have, could have made had they not collapsed under a collective creative disaffection a couple of years ago. Onstage in London on 20 November 1999 Malkmus announced “We’re retiring for the foreseeable future.” Their UK label Domino confirmed the breakup the following week.
    A few months later in Portland, Malkmus got together with bassist Joanna Bolme (The Minders, The Spinanes, Calamity Jane) and percussionist John Moen (The Fastbacks, The Dharma Bums, The Maroons) to record new songs at Jackpot! Recording, where Bolme works as an engineer. He named his new band The Jicks. (Uh... OK.) The sessions included Church On White, a lovely 3/4 ballad that Malkmus had written while still in Pavement as a tribute to a friend, novelist Robert Bingham who had died the previous fall at age 33 from a drug overdose.
    Like much of Pavement’s catalog, Malkmus’ solo debut bears an interesting tension between an abhorrence of things 'classic' or 'polished' (in a new lyric he says “Take me off the list. I don’t want to be missed.”) and a natural inclination to create them. The result is beauty, dry humor, and poignancy all ethereal and offhand enough to drift away on the slightest breeze (and thereby all the more meaningful).
    There’s another Pavement-esque tension here as well, between harmony and dissonance. It’s most evident on the slow rocker Pink India, whose musical arrangement is a playful argument between aggression and relaxation.
    Malkmus’ heroes rise in strong evidence on the disc. John Lennon’s Oh Yoko! and The Rolling Stones’s Beast Of Burden intermingle on Vague Space. Neil Young’s vocal stylings appear briefly on Trojan Curfew. Malkmus does his best Lou Reed when he sings, on The Hook, “By 31 I was a captain of a galleon—I was Poseidon’s new son.” Surprise noises and sound effects just about everywhere, and false beginnings and endings, evoke Malkmus’ idols Pere Ubu.
    The new album exhibits a remarkably rich tonal palette, with flute, cowbell, electronics, maracas, hand claps, vibes, synths, acoustic & electronic percussion, and even kazoo. For all that, the puzzle pieces all fall into place and the seams disappear.
    Lyrically opaque, like poetry more than a novel, the songs on the album nonetheless bear an emotional transparency that’s very satisfying. The term that comes to mind is 'natural beauty.'
    The next single will be Malkmus’ tragicomic ballad Jenny & The Ess-Dog, due early April. Like the album’s first single Discretion Grove, released three weeks ago, the new one will contain non-album material. (And, for nostalgists, sometime down the road Matador will release a DVD containing all of Pavement’s videos along with live footage.)
    The debut album by Stephen Malkmus and The Jicks earns four bites out of five.

Rockbites ratings  5: life changing, 4: stunning, 3: captivating, 2: amusing, 1: annoying.

| Stephen Malkmus | | Abandoned Pavement site | | article on Bingham's death | | bio | | discography | | CD | | top of page |

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