Even Stephen

Malkmus rides solo

by Richard C. Walls

Stephen Malkmus's first and homonymous post-Pavement solo album on Matador is brimming with nifty little songs that sound like personalized portions of other songs stitched together and given an overall gloss of -- might as well get this word out of the way early on -- irony. Not that irony is all that it used to be; when an aesthetic stance that was once used for garnishing becomes a semi-popular main ingredient, it's bound to lose some of its tang. Pavement and irony, as far as indie music goes (or went), really hit their stride around the same time (early '90s), when the group gradually began to peel back the fuzz from their sound and Malkmus perfected his art of stringing together cool non sequiturs. Discordant sound was eventually replaced by dissonant, allusive lyrics that offered what meaning could be grabbed on the run. Meanwhile the ironic slant (Pavement were basically, after all, funny) became a left-of-the-dial staple, and by their last album, Terror Twilight (Matador), the main distancing effect was an abiding professionalism. Which may be why the band broke up, though I doubt it.

Anyway, although Stephen Malkmus inevitably has some of that late-Pavement feel -- staking its claim to below-the-mainstream cred not through shards of noise or frat-boy profanities but by dint of Malkmus's own recondite whimsy -- it's altogether lighter than anything his old band put out. Fluffier, even; definitely airier. Although he's said (ironically, of course) that this project is like Pavement with a new rhythm section -- Joanna Bolme on bass and John Moen on drums -- it's more like Pavement without the tendency toward self-effacing obscurantism. Not that he's become horribly sincere or anything like that, or that all his lyrics suddenly make sense; it's just that you can hear most of them now, proffered with the aid of non-aggressive bandmates.

And what you can hear alternates between words being churned out by the old mock-heroic-poetry machine and shaggy-dog stories that have nothing but a middle. For some reason, or perhaps not, the single from the disc is in the former category, a pleasant pop/rock song that chugs along at mid-tempo and has lyrics that make you want to slap the guy -- e.g., "ceremonial dead trees told him all he could do." But then it also has "I felt up your feelings," which is worthy of Elvis C. back in the days when his mind was still racing, and "you'll never run aground/when the sun is down," which would make a dandy pillow sampler. One can freely quote this stuff out of context without fear of misrepresentation. The beauty part is you're not always sure that you heard him right, which makes for some interactive musing, as in the middle of the nearly comprehensible song about fickle Greek gods, "Trojan Curfew," when he suddenly sings "you could see chopped tobacco in her teeth" -- or maybe not, because there's no lyric sheet, and so that one may be mine.

But that's an old game, and the best songs are more straightforward. "The Hook" has an infectiously crunchy groove, coming on like a Stones tribute, complete with cowbell and an extended guitar-solo quote from "Tumbling Dice." Doing his best Lou Reed impersonation, Malkmus sings, "At age 19 I was kidnapped by Turkish pirates/Mediterranean thugs/after some torture they considered me their mascot . . . " and so on until the lad becomes a hardened pirate himself: "we were killers with the cold eyes of sailors," he sings, which is backwards, of course -- can't let things get too normal. "Jenny and the Ess-Dog" begins "Jenny dates a man/in a '60s cover band" and goes on to describe their ill-starred romance with a surprising amount of telling detail, right down to Jenny's wretched toe rings. "Phantasies" is an imitation of an imitation, a "songoid" ostensibly reminiscent of the early '60s but actually sounding like something from Grease -- a terribly cute but nicely cluttered fantasy about living in Alaska.

Ah, maturity. It makes for catchy, lucid songwriting. Still, there's a lot of the old BS being slung here, enough so that long-time fans who are still true believers won't detect the nasty taint of sellout. The Westerbergian "Pink India" is haughtily indecipherable (and, as on "Jo Jo's Jacket," the lyrics dissolve for an instrumental second half), while the equally impenetrable "Vogue Space" mocks sophistication with its ghostly traces of Lorenz Hart ("We'll split the difference/call it quits/this is no new romantic blitz/krieg"). The main tonality of the disc, though, is an open, barefaced vibe, as if Malkmus, having fronted one of the most original and influential bands of the past decade, felt he had nothing more to prove except that he can continue to write decent songs after the ragged strategies of indie assertion have become a less-than-hip affectation. For now.