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If you chart Malkmus's career in it's 19-year lo-fi entirety, it starts high on the Y axis (labelled 'brilliance!') for the first three Pavement albums: Slanted & Enchanted, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain and Wowie Zowie... Before dipping in to a bit of a trough for Terror Twlight and his eponymous debut. Commonly, this decline would continue for solo artists who leave legendary bands - but luckily Pig Lib began the revival, Face The Truth cut one mean peak and Real Emotional Trash gets him back close to his unique best. Seriously, it's that good.
Obviously the youthful abandonment which made those early albums so exciting isn't there. Instead, a more mature, measured and produced approach to chaos prevails creating something similar, despite being completely anti-Pavement.
The guitars still howl, screech, and blister. Songs still take their own paths, potholed by intricate scribbles of guitar, before they break-down, build and then break down once more.
This is the longest of his solo albums with six songs passing five minutes (and the title song passing 10). This space and freedom shows off what a great guitarist Malkmus is. Baltimore finds itself at the other end of six and a half minutes with hardly a word spoken, instead rammed with some pretty tasty guitar noodling. And straight from Baltimore we go to Gardenia; a three minute example of great pop writing.
The Jicks must take their credit for this album too (now with Janet Weiss formerly of Sleater-Kinney warming the drum stool). They sound like his band; pulling in the same direction as their unpredictable leader, and pulling against when necessary. It's this unity which gives rise to moments which could easily fit on a Pavement record - namely on Brighten The Corners and namely Out Of Reaches.
Pray this unity and creativity continues - because if this peak stays on the rise, who knows his fifth album could take us?
Real Emotional Trash is his most consistently brilliant album to date. --Jonathan Raitt
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And he really doesn't disappoint in his fourth full-length solo album with the Jicks, "Real Emotional Trash," which strikes a brilliant balance between the sounds of "Pig Lib" and "Face the Truth." Malkmus preserves his insane lyrics and fuzz-freakery, but wraps them around some gloriously eccentric psychedelic rock songs.
It opens with a dark, sludgy bassline, festooned in buzzing riffs, with Malkmus droning wearily, "Of all my stoned digressions/Some have mutated into the truth." But the slow grimy grinds suddenly speeds up... and melts away into a sublime little pop melody ("Taken with pride like a dragonfly/dragonfly wants a piece of pie!") that alternates between stoner riffs and delightfully sunny harmonium melodies.
The title track is a ten-minute bounce of peppy, sputtering guitar rock split by a drowsy, ringing expanse, and fading out to a meandering little guitar melody, as if he were falling asleep at the strings.
But he hasn't, because it's just the start of a whole new string of songs -- quirky buzzy pop, loopy little experimental rockers, and a lot of meandering rock'n'roll with fuzzy hard edges and drips of keyboard. It finishes up with two really delicious little songs -- the sunny shimmers of "We Can't Help You" and the intimate psychfolky sound of "Wicked Wanda."
When listening to a Stephen Malkmus album, I'm never entirely sure what he's crafting. "Real Emotional Trash" happily wobbles between pop epic, experimental concept album, and quirky indie fuzz-rocker without committing to any one sound, and Malkmus does a pretty solid job interweaving them together. This is very much his style, but striking a balance between quirk and listener-friendliness.
And he mostly sticks to what has worked for him in the past -- pleasantly meandering rockers and peppy pop, given some odd edges. His ringing guitar riffs are simply astounding, twisting and stretching beyond what you'd think the instrument could manage -- along with the Jicks' flexible instrumentation. The instrumentation is a fluid, glorious stream of piano, drumming, fuzz bass and rippling hollow keyboard, as in the beautiful opening of "We Can't Help You."
Don't worry, he doesn't just retread. There are some psychedelic twists here and there, while "Elmo Delmo" and the title track both have stretches of spacey, buzzy prog-rock in the middle. While not as accessible as the straightforward rockers, they're still pretty brilliant.
And Malkmus genuinely sounds like he's having fun, as his mellow voice darts in and out of the music. He can be murmuring one minute, and then yowl out at the listener the next. And as expected, his lyrics are really weird and nonsensical, but with some very clever moments here and there ("Who is in the sand?/the world is my oyster/I feel like a nympho stuck in a cloister"). Chuckle.
The title of "Real Emotional Trash" might give you the wrong idea, because Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks' latest is anything but trash. It's polished, weird, and very endearing.
A grower
That's more a number than a word I guess...
With an "s" on the end...
Hands down album of the year 2009.
second MMJ - Evil urges
third Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes
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