This is a revived version of a Line Out post about Stephen Malkmus's Wig Out at Jagbags (these posts were purged from the internet after The Stranger pulled the plug on the blog).
After Two Years in Berlin, Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks Unveil Wig Out at Jagbags
- Matador Records
Wig Out at Jagbags
(Matador Records)
Because I'm a glutton for punishment, I listened to the new Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks album twice. It's not that I hate it; it's just that it bugs me—he bugs me—but there are aspects to Malkmus's aesthetic that I find compelling. The prog-folk guitar work throughout the record, for instance, represents some of his finest playing yet. But the lyrics can be incredibly irritating.
I felt much the same way about Pavement, which is why I gave up on that band so early in their career (I own exactly one album and saw exactly one show). The great thing about their pre-Slanted and Enchanted output, like 1991's Perfect Sound Forever EP: you can barely make out what Malkmus is saying.
So, I decided to go back and revisit 2003's Pig Lib, the last Malkmus release I picked up, to see if it bugged me as much, and it didn't, although it isn't a world away from Wig Out at Jagbags, which includes two of the same band members (I also caught his in-store that year at the old Sonic Boom location on 15th Avenue in Capitol Hill).
Malkmus is intelligent and well read, and that's great as far as it goes, but he can come across as stiff and smug, like he's trying to impress, rather than to simply express himself ("Lariat" includes the line, "We lived on Tennyson and venison, and the Grateful Dead").
The ideas are there, which is more than many artists can claim, but there's a lack of poetry, which flows more easily through the work of masters like Leonard Cohen and Scott Walker. And maybe that isn't fair, since Can and the Fall have served as more overt influences—except I feel the same about Damo Suzuki and Mark E. Smith.
In all honesty, I was predisposed to dislike Wig Out after reading Malkmus's notes about it. I try to listen to every record with an open mind, but I read the notes first, and they colored my impressions. It wasn't his words, but the tone that I found a little off-putting. There was a whiff of humblebrag to the thing.
Berlin, while very hip and in some ways the "center" of Europe, is still isolated. At least if you are an American Dad. Pretty amazing place as you probably already know, and so easy to disappear into. Perhaps any "big" city has this quality—but a New one (to me), where they speak German (mostly)…well, you can almost cease to exist. Which is of course a liberating fantasy. But after two years there, we were Starting to Exist. It was like an average birth, without pain. I worked the lyrics/chords out on a computer on someone else's table in someone else's apartment. And This is what you get: Projected Imaginings of ROck and ROll from the freezing north, rendered by West Coast stalwarts and a Dutch Uncle.
And a few of the songs, like "Cinnamon and Lesbians," read the same way—stiff and smug—but there are others, like the psych-glam closing track "Surreal Teenagers" that help to compensate for those awkward moments ("Surreal" plays like a proggy counterpart to Pig Lib's "1% of One"). And maybe that's why I found myself returning to an album that I had originally dismissed, instead of just letting it go; not thinking about it, not writing about it, and permanently deleting the download from my hard drive so that I would never have to deal with it again.
"Cinnamon," which recalls Beck's "Mixed Bizness" line—"and all the lesbians scream"—still bothers me, because he trivializes an entire group of people in order to take a Portlandia-like swipe at Oregon, but the song is growing on me.* Much like the rest of this damn record, which I wanted to dislike, but Malkmus is my personal version of the Mafia, i.e. just when I thought I was out...he pulled me back in.
*Beck produced 2011's Mirror Traffic, the last Jicks LP to feature Janet Weiss.
No comments:
Post a Comment