Stephen Malkmus
w/Martha Wainwright
Sat June 18, Neumo’s,10 pm, $15.
Stephen Malkmus is one of the truly great, somewhat bratty, and perhaps overly ironic alternative songwriters of the ’90s. He deftly fashioned superb Pavement records from when the band was conceived in the music-less farmland of Stockton, California in 1989 until they came apart in 1999. Immediately after the band’s demise, Malkmus set off upon a solo career, releasing his Pig Lib in 2003. Content with smaller crowds of devoted fans, Malkmus performed with his band the Jicks under a less blinding spotlight, indulging in weirder music and more avant guitar stylings.
“It’s been as rewarding as playing with Pavement,” says Malkmus from his home in Portland, Oregon. “In some ways, you can’t take away your first time at doing things. But then again, you do things wrong the first time, just like teenaged kids when they are having sex. They’re all completely amped up and it’s all so meaningful and stuff. If you look back and think about what you were doing, you’re probably better at it now.”
Malkmus’s latest release, Face the Truth, begins with its most eccentric song, “Pencil Rot.” After some robotic squeaks from a synthesizer, Malkmus sings, “There’s a villain in my head/and he’s giving me shocks/save me from me save me from me/His name is Leather McWhip/and he needs to be stopped.” An inventive tune, “Pencil Rot” flies randomly as a Frisbee toss in an insane asylum. The second song, “It Kills,” has a melody that recalls a mellow, gleefully trippy Grateful Dead number. After that opening opus, longtime Pavement fans might ponder of Truth‘s twisted hippie freakouts, “Where exactly is Malkmus going with this?”
“I wanted it to sound a little bit unhinged,” explains Malkmus of the record, “like one dude that had a weird axe to grind. It’s sort of a vanity project in a way and maybe nobody is going to listen to it, but there’s something a little bit magical about it. I guess it would be the kind of outsider, do-it-yourself, private pressing records that people do; people who decide to pay for their own record to be made and they like it and they drink beer and listen to it really loud, but no one else does. That’s the kind of feeling I was going for.”
Unfortunately, Malkmus succeeds in that aim, crafting a record that may only speak to music geeks. Face the Truth isn’t crammed with sweet Pavement-like standards like his first solo record was, nor is there an original tune like “Dark Wave” from Pig Lib that sparkles with giddy cleverness. Detractors sometimes called Pavement out for their inability to rock out live, hindering what critics claimed could’ve otherwise been a truly fantastic indie band. But that wasn’t the case. Pavement could indeed spit out some flashy guitar tunage when they thought it was called for.
Face the Truth is one of Malkmus’s few (maybe his only) creations that don’t rock. After the first two songs, the album topples downhill, impressed a bit too much perhaps with its own pseudo oddness and abstract musical inclinations. It’s not just that the songs are slow, but that they’re aimless. There isn’t a glowing mood piece like “The Hexx” from Pavement’s Terror Twilight, nor any song that’s buoyantly peculiar like “…and Carrot Rope” (also off Terror Twilight). For what’s supposed to be an unhinged, wacky record, Face the Truth could actually be weirder or have more than one number (“Pencil Rot”) that halfway rocks. Songs like “I’ve Hardly Been” and “Loud Cloud Crowd” leave almost no impression, and “Freeze the Saints” is a Valium of a song, lulling the listener into a deep slumber.
Malkmus doesn’t really come off as a weirdo, so his attempt at doing the outsider-sounding-music thing seems insincere. It’s a slight blot, though, on his impeccable track record of dazzling albums.
“You have to set your sights a little lower toward just connecting with people in smaller clubs and the underground,” says Malkmus of his career trajectory. “With Pavement, there was some youthful immaturity and brattiness. We were doing too much because people liked us and we got burned out. Now, we’re pretty mature in a good way, not in a boring grandpa way.”
Not yet making grandpa music, Malkmus still has great records up his sleeve. But he should avoid letting his inner geek make suggestions for the next one.