ALBUM OF THE WEEK: Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks – Wig Out At Jag Bags
Artrocker dub Pavement frontman’s latest high jinks album of the week.
Album Reviews | Released
Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks – Wig Out At Jagbags
(Domino Records)
4 out of 5
Indie rock stalwarts Pavement kicked it from the curb to the main road in their not-so-triumphant return to form in 2010. With a selection of live performances in the shape of a worldwide tour, culminating in the classic career closing selection of the reflective back catalogue definer – the best of album Quarantine The Past: The Best Of Pavement.
While the Pavement chapter maybe fully read for now, frontman and stringer Stephen Malkmus has never been one to rest on laurels. He fills all spare time from curb crawling in Pavement into solo ideas supported by The Jinks.
Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks provide a delicate departure from the low-fi grumble of his past work. Here Malkmus is given free rein to explore sounds that stretch further than the 90s with deeply distracted story telling. On album number six with The Jicks, it seems this exploration and experimentation has found the golden land.
This new land is an acidic melting pot of punked poetry, a dark and dangerous concoction that is just as 96% brilliant as a Heisenburg development. “Planetary motion circles round the sun,” pipes Malkmus on album opener Planetary Motion, a marker of the otherworldly workings of this excursion. Fuzzed out muffles of distortion hark back to life on the pavement, however as he continues with “you are the chosen one,” affirmance is delivered.
Of course Malkmus is indulging in himself – this is his project after all – however concentration has been given to work a welcome to a life intertwined with The Jicks into something more welcome for households.
Houston Hades and Shibboleth play out a collective of superb functionality and fusion. The first offers a pop graced soother, where tenderly The Jicks soften Malkmus’ empowered madness. The latter delivers an anthemic pelt of gracious melodies, they feel more gargantuan stadia than gutter grazed skinny jeans.
As the name Wig Out At Jagbags suggests, the LP shares its healthy appetite for the insane and deranged but provides this in an intelligent delivery of kind coyness. The snarling punk rock spit of “This one’s for you granddad!” introduces Malkmus’ tongue almost bursting through his cheek on the short and ever-so-satisfying Rumble At The Ranio. The attack on those annoyingly angry pogoing bastards continues with wistful muses of, “Come and join us in this punk rock tune.”
The work of Pavement may well be strictly laid in concrete today, academia in the inspiring the resurgence of 90’s trash we see developing from the capital and Birmingham. However the life of the band is continued and expanded through Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks. Wig Out At Jagbags is a tightrope, linking the past and the present. It may be easier for Malkmus to falter back to sounds before – of which this album confides – however it is the moments when he presses forward to dangerous centrepieces that his welcome ‘wig outs’ take finest shape.
David Sullivan
