Stephen Malkmus and The Jicks – Real Emotional Trash
Real Emotional Trash is probably the most streamlined and perfectly formed album Stephen Malkmus has produced since leaving the legendary Pavement close to a decade ago. This is a long player that works like a long player from an artist that has sometimes released opus’s that appear like a collection of great, but un-sequenced, mismatched songs gathered together and called an album. As the fourth Malkmus-named release and the second under the moniker of The Jicks, Real Emotional Trash continues where the last Jicks album Pig Lib left off. The first track, “Dragonfly Pie” begins with the same hoary old Pig Lib prog-rock fuzzy guitar that sometimes disturbed the more traditional sounding indie guitar jangle, usually associated with Mr Malkmus. On the previous Jicks record the pressing of the progressive rock guitar pedal seemed a little discordant and absurd, as if a new clever trick was being played with, rather than being embraced. On Real Emotional Trash the prog guitar and AOR rock templates abound and are incorporated into the real sound of a band, rather than ugly sounding blasts of 70s rock introduced into a contemporary indie rock outfit. Maybe this is due to The Jicks, with the introduction of Sleater-Kinney’s Janet Weiss on the drums, sounding like a real band for the first time, as opposed to working as a backing group for a lead singer.
Thankfully this record doesn’t work as a piece of shocking rock indulgence. Even if the songs do have a tendency to meander off into long-winded jams, the cryptic lyrics of Malkmus are still submerged in engaging melodies and interesting key changes, by whatever indie/rock/prog guitar sound that seems to pepper them. It’s almost as if Real Emotional Trash could be a distant cousin to Pavement’s rambling but pleasurable Wowee Zowee, such is the disorderly route taken on some of the tracks.
Still, after a number of not too dissimilar wig-out jams delivered in the same tone there’s a lot of room for diminishing attention spans to evaporate and in a world of shuffling songs and the choice of removing the worst album tracks on your media player, the I’m-not-listening-to-this-anymore-and-thinking-about-my laundry option given by the band’s wallowing “hey man, let’s rock–out” disposition does them a little disservice. This is a shame, because some of the songs included on this album are among the best Stephen Malkmus has written in the last ten years. Even the title track, “Real Emotional Trash”, with its ten-minute duration may luxuriate in an instrumental wilderness, but there’s nothing in all the stoned musical digressions that ever becomes boring. At the other end of the spectrum the shorter songs like “We Can’t Help You” or “Gardenia” are flawless and immediate Malkmus-penned indie-pop ditties, that don’t (for once) sit out of place amongst a stockpile of random and ambling songs, even here on an album of what seems to (on the surface) be full of the worst kind of rock extravagances.
Gardenia by Stephen Malkmus and The Jicks
Dragonfly Pie by Stephen Malkmus and The Jicks
Hey I had trouble finding a reasonable sized version of the title track for you. The only one I could find was 14mb.