STEPHEN MALKMUS
Moth Club, London, September 18 Two shows in one night from alt.rock’s king of awks
Despite their disruptive intention, recent songs are packed with hooks
YOU can understand why Matador baulked when Stephen Malkmus first handed over the tapes of Groove Denied. Instead of the avuncular jangle and quizzical riffage of recent Jicks efforts or his eponymous 2001 solo debut, they were confronted with “Belziger Faceplant”, the sound of a curious middle-aged man lurching unsteadily around a hip Berlin nightclub. Yet when the album was eventually released in March – actually containing some pretty great songs, amid the wonky drum-machine experiments – it soon became clear what Malkmus was up to.
Despite their eventual acceptance into the rock canon, Pavement were always a thrillingly awkward proposition: lyrical non sequiturs, melodies never quite going where you expected, unreadable tensions on stage, the blunders left in. Groove Denied certainly felt like an attempt to reconnect with that wayward spirit of early Pavement while chiselling away at the latter-day (mis)perception of Malkmus as a harmless alt.rock grandpa.
That awkwardness is amplified by these solo shows – genuinely solo, in the sense that there are no other musicians on stage nor even any roadies on hand to quickly reset the malfunctioning equipment. During the first of the evening’s two sets, Malkmus appears unusually flustered, declining the invitation to banter with the audience. “There’s a lot going on up here,” he protests, grappling simultaneously with laptop, guitar and a toy-like OP-1 synth. It’s an erratic set, careening back and forth between Groove Denied’s sputtering synthpop and straight-up renditions of Pavement faves like “Spit On A Stranger” and “Frontwards”.
In the midst of all this, Malkmus must factor in a tribute to his friend and former bandmate David Berman, who recently passed on. But of course he doesn’t really do sentimental, so there are no long speeches; instead he launches without warning into Silver Jews’ “Trains Across The Sea”, with the line about 50,000 beers just washing against him “like the sea into a pier” proving particularly poignant. Later, he fluffs the words to another Silver Jews classic, “The Wild Kindness”, but that’s OK: “Berman was also forgetful of his lyrics,” Malkmus assures.
These touching moments also serve to point up the elegiac qualities of Groove Denied’s “Grown Nothing” (“Where will you go?/i cannot imagine you outside of your frequency/babe you’d be a dying tree”). Despite the disruptive intention of these recent songs, they’re still packed with addictive, off-kilter hooks and hidden lyrical profundities in the classic Malkmus style, arguably some of the best stuff he’s written this century.
The second show of the night is more focused, the machines more compliant, allowing Malkmus to add some astringent soloing (on one of St Vincent’s signature Music Man guitars) to his extended computer jams. A skulking cover of The Velvet Underground’s “Ocean” finds its reflection in the blithely murderous “Ocean Of Revenge”. The surging Peter Hook bassline of “A Bit Wilder” prompts a tentative air-punch. “Spit On A Stranger” is dropped and replaced by a spiky version of that most dissenting of Pavement songs, “Fight This Generation” (“Fight this fuckin’ generation,” Malkmus mutters at the end, which is as close as he gets to political commentary). It all adds up to a unique evening’s entertainment: equally elegant and awry, casual yet intense, quite emotional in places but also a bit daft.
Next on the agenda is a high-profile Pavement re-reunion, with the band headlining June’s Primavera festival in Barcelona and Porto. On this evidence, anyone hoping for a cosy, nostalgic wallow will be sorely disappointed. Which is exactly how it should be.