Rattled by The Kush
STEPHEN MALKMUS would’ve made a terribly untrustworthy hippy. Too snarky for the commune; too cynical for spiritual enlightenment; an insurgent who can’t stop himself satirising the language of revolution. For all his urbane manners, though, Malkmus has kept hanging around on the edge of the love-in, ever since 1994 and Pavement’s Fillmore Jive. From time to time, his penchant for jams has reached a critical mass – especially on 2003’s Pig Lib and 2008’s Real Emotional Trash, where the anthropological studies came with a genuine passion for freakouts. Malkmus, it transpired, was actually a Deadhead in indie hipster drag.
On a series of photographs distributed last year, he conclusively appeared to out himself. They showed Malkmus posing with an acoustic guitar and wearing an embroidered yellow tunic, voluminous of sleeve, the kind last seen on a psychedelic Turkish rocker circa 1972. But with reliable perversity, the accompanying album, Groove
Denied, was further from the hippy ideal than any in
Malkmus’s now-sizeable solo catalogue: a set of bedroom cold wave songs indebted to the grimmer outliers of ’80s synthpop.
Traditional Techniques, the ninth Malkmus album since the demise of Pavement, is more plausibly the soundtrack to that tunic. As on Groove Denied, his regular crew The Jicks do not feature, replaced this time by Portland compadre Chris Funk, mostly of The Decemberists, on pedal steel and production, and the eminent guitarist Matt Sweeney, whose CV encompasses Will Oldham and Endless Boogie plus session work for Johnny Cash, Jake Bugg and Adele. The mood is end of the ’60s, all-night cross-legged sessions on the Persian rug, Whole Earth Catalog near at hand. The vibe? Trips to Afghanistan on the opium trail; back-to-nature urges commuted into a weird take on country music.
It’s a ridiculous conceit, not least when two more musicians, Qais Essar and Eric Zang, turn up to make hay with the Afghani instruments in Funk’s studio. But an enduring Malkmus gift is to embrace esoteric music and bend it to his will, while also being aware of the cultural arrogance involved in appropriation. As a longtime connoisseur of leftist academic language, you can hear the huge wry pleasure he takes in pivoting one sleepy track here, Signal Western, on the word “decolonise”.
More important still, these loose, predominantly acoustic arrangements are a fine fit for Malkmus’s usual shtick; shaggy, ambulatory songs full of odd twists and rococo angles that seem designed to undermine pretension rather than amplify it.
Shadowbanned, for instance, makes good on the crypto-exotic promise of Pavement’s Folk Jam, a thicket of twang, drone and Anatolian flute that’s intoxicating in spite of itself. “Come and see us shred,” promises Malkmus. The Shadowbanned, it should also be noted, are “top of the bill in Blackpool”.
If there’s an obvious precedent, it might be the US Kaleidoscope fronted by David Lindley, whose music similarly conjured a happening in the interzone between ballroom psychedelia, frontier folk and ethnological forgery, or The Habibiya, devout English jammers who briefly emerged from the ruins of Mighty Baby. Cash Up channels the homebaked country warmth of the New Riders Of The Purple Sage, too, while Xtian Man is a fantastic desert rock stomp, of sorts, Sweeney ripping out serpentine electric solos that betray his recent collaborations with Tinariwen.
In the midst of it all there is Malkmus, armed with a 12-string acoustic and a book or two by the German philosopher Theodor Adorno. Traditional Techniques plucks its name from an Adorno essay, and the theorist’s views on the ’60s counterculture and protest music – how can it be truly rebellious when it exists in a capitalist marketplace? – inform some good gags, too. “So much began with the flower children,” posits Flowin’ Robes. “But we soon discovered all is not beautiful/ There’s something wrong in our heads.”
With Malkmus, every blissout comes with a necessary caveat, every nirvana is transient, and the rickety underground utopia of Traditional Techniques is not built to last. This
summer, he’ll be back on the festival circuit, cashing up with a reformed Pavement.