A World Spinning On Its Axis

Stephen Malkmus “Civilized Satanist” – I highly recommend checking out Joe Levy’s review of the recent Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain reissue in the new issue of the Village Voice, mostly because he makes a very good point about Stephen Malkmus’ body of work that I’ve been attempting to articulate for a few years now.

Levy says:

…you can hear how he used his habit of making lyrics up at the mic to map his unconscious, and how much power the music draws from just that. The sloppy off-the-cuff jokes (“I never had any children. . . . Maybe I’d like to fuck a woman and make one/But I don’t know if I should because I don’t have a real steady job”) make it plain that his great subject was a longing for love and domesticity at war with the bohemian pull of poetry, art, and rock & roll. So much for his much-bruited lyrical opacity.

Exactly! That theme of domesticity vs. romanticism is most obviously present on Brighten The Corners, but if you pay attention, it is there in the lyrics of the first Pavement 7″ right up through Malkmus’ new post-Pig Lib material.

Anyway, this is a recording from a one-off Stephen Malkmus solo gig at (I believe) a museum somewhere in California a few months before Terror Twilight was recorded in 1998. The show was widely circulated in Pavement fan circles at the time, but it is surprisingly difficult to find in its entirety online. (If you have the complete show in mp3, please contact me!) “Civilized Satanist” is only a speculative title for this song, which to my knowledge was never completed in the studio and was only ever played at this gig and another similar solo show in the same month. The song is built around a sample of Moby Grape’s “I Am Not Willing,” and features a mock-rap/spoken word vocal and lots and lots of noodling. The performance is very sloppy, but Malkmus’ remarks on his own errors (“that’s not a sample, I actually played that”) are very endearing.

General Electrics “Time To Undress” – Though I am certain that General Electrics were going for something reminiscent of an earlier era, this song seems like a retro-90s pastiche to me. Think Money Mark, The Automator, Cornershop, Air, Pizzicato Five – all of those mid-to-late 90s albums which sounded shiny and vaguely futuristic at the time of their release, but seem very dated at the moment because they are too recent to feel properly nostalgic. I am certain that there will be a widespread critical reevaluation of this sort of music within the next ten years, but until then, it will keep sounding undeniably pleasureable but ineffably awkward to the ears of neophiles like myself. (Click here to buy it from Juno.)