Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks @ The Great American Music Hall 12/19/07
Wednesday, January 09 2008
STEPHEN MALKMUS AND THE JICKS
BLITZEN TRAPPER
Great American Music Hall Dec. 19, 2007
Stephen Malkmus hasn’t bothered to update his Myspace page since the announcement of his 2005 album Face the Truth. Despite this he still managed to roll into SF – one stop on a two show mini-tour – and sell out the Great American Music Hall on a rainy December weeknight.
Malkmus’s strength has always been the tension he so gracefully maintains between apathy and art. It’s a kind of anti-fashion, cooler than fashion because the results are so damn intriguing, having seemingly sprung up ex nihilo. This leaves him with fans geeked-out enough to troll such fringes as the Stephen Malkmus and Matador Records message boards, in order to stay on his crumb trail. At this point in his solo career, clearly this fervor isn’t a decaying Pavement obsession: Malkmus still writes beautifully demented songs, and the Jicks, with freshly added drummer Janet Weiss (formerly of Sleater-Kinney), fucking rock.
Blitzen Trapper photo by Nilina Mason-Campbell
Fellow Portlanders Blitzen Trapper opened the show with a very tight set of countrified rock. I admit to not having heard Wild Mountain Nation – or any of the band’s earlier albums – before the show. My only expectation was set by the album’s cover art, which when I saw it reminded me immediately of Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, and that really good Lynyrd Skynyrd song they wrote, “Wild Mountain Nation.” Naturally, I assumed that the band would sound like a hodge-podge of poorly disguised imitations. Every band’s sound is, to some extent, a pastiche; and every band must make a corrective move to escape whatever shadows it can’t simply kill with the light of pure beauty, or else . . . And though Blitzen Trapper sounded at times like Graham Parsons and at others like Wilco playing Wowee Zowe (and only once like Skynyrd), they had enough of that beauty, and energy, to make me thoroughly enjoy my drinks.
Blitzen Trapper got the cordial to slightly enthusiastic treatment from a crowd that turned from pleased sippers to weed smokers and rowdy hollerers when Malkmus and the Jicks took stage. The band opened with the heavy and pleading three-cord anthem “Baby C’mon,” a song that offered the kind of direct, reciprocal communication the crowd was seeking with their enthusiasm. From there the Jicks played a generous helping of tracks from their forthcoming album, Real Emotional Trash. “Elmo Delmo” was a standout tune – a darker, jammy epic in the vein of “No More Shoes.” Title track “Real Emotional Trash” began with a tender melody before opening up with sprawling guitar work and an evolving song structure, then disintegrating into a blues jam. The show intensified as the left side of the room got higher and the right side danced and shouted. The Jicks unleashed even more new material, from straight-ahead, quirky pop tune “Gardenia,” to meandering guitar jam “Baltimore Again.”
Stephen Malkmus and a Jick
One forgets the raw power of the Jicks’ live sound. Especially now, with Weiss, they’re a heavy band. Weiss’ frenetic bashing elevates the required intensity of the other players. Malkmus’ songwriting is also on a tangent into stoner rock/prog territory, which makes weird sense remembering Pavement’s avant-hardcore roots. The relative thrash and speed of early Pavement EP’s Demolition Plot and Perfect Sound Forever, or a song like “Conduit For Sale!,” are logical analogues for the sonic pathos the Jicks evoke live. Only the aesthetics have changed. A song like “Dragon Fly Pie” finds reference points in Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” and Pavement’s own “The Hex,” taking big heavy steps and crushing the silence.
Malkmus and bassist Johanna Bolme engaged in some blithe banter throughout the night. Malkmus earned boos with snide remarks about Pop Scene and the proliferation of crepe restaurants. This nonchalant irony is a charm that has become, in fact, a literal expression, since we’ve become so used to it: a dull surface obviously fronting for a deep and idiosyncratic imagination. Malkmus is able to provoke an audience with a shrug and a wink. This shouldn’t be interpreted as what Silver Jew David Berman described as the “power of not caring.” Clearly he plays to his audience with subtleties, and a wink or sarcastic quip signals his graciousness. Likewise, the songs deliver a poignancy surpassing the non-sequiturs and unsettling notes they are composed of.
The band closed with a three-song encore of oldies: “Post Paint Boy,” “Church on White” and a botched version of “1% of 1.” Three false starts of “Post Paint Boy” made for apt suspense. It was rewarded by tight versions of all but “1% of 1,” which was mangled by bad notes, but rang pleasantly nostalgic, recalling the glorious mess that Pavement was prone to make.
