It’s The Old Fruit That Makes Wine

Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks @ Bowery Ballroom 3/31/08
Dragonfly Pie / Gardenia / Baby C’mon / We Can’t Help You / Hopscotch Willie / Real Emotional Trash / Cold Son / Post-Paint Boy / Oyster / Elmo Delmo / Baltimore / Church On White // Out Of Reaches / I Don’t Care About You (Fear cover) / Alright, Alright, Alright (Mungo Jerry cover) / Dark Wave

You know what? The Jicks is funky music. They’s a powerhouse. Especially Janet Weiss.

Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks “Real Emotional Trash” – If you look back on it, through every phase of Stephen Malkmus’ career as a musician and songwriter, there’s a fairly constant lyrical theme. Basically, everything he writes is an expression of restlessness, and the dulled anxieties of a guy who always has his eye on the exits, even when he’s perfectly happy. This is not a man who writes about being hung up on anyone — he’s either getting flirty with you, enjoying the moment with you, unhappy with you, leaving you, or looking back on what you had while moving on into the horizon. In the songs that are not directly or indirectly about relationships, he’s either dodging the topic of himself with oddball narratives or abstracted language, but even then, there’s this feeling of “hey, let’s see what happens, let’s find out what’s out around the bend.”

So naturally, things were bound to get a little complicated once he settled down. After dispensing advice to both himself and others on Face The Truth, the songs on Real Emotional Trash find the writer easing into stability and commitment. Basically, the fourth Jicks album is the emotional flipside of the fourth Pavement album, Brighten The Corners, a record primarily concerned with observing domesticity and weighing its merits from afar. In some cases, he’s clearing having a good time with it — “Gardenia” may end with an expression of dull frustration, but it’s a genuinely sweet tune about the daily reality of unconditional love. In others, he’s self-medicating and pondering a creeping existential dread. Tellingly, most the record focuses on the latter, as it begins with his “stoned digressions,” and ends with him spacing out just enough to obscure his ego and sidestep his fears.

The epic “Real Emotional Trash” splits the difference between the pleasure and the angst. There’s some deliberate irony at the start, with him singing “taking out the wife,” and then “daddy’s on the run” with a just a bit of distance in order to get across a bemused “huh, I guess this is my life now” sentiment. Like a lot of the songs on the record, it’s the sound of a guy feeling out the space in his life, and figuring out how to slip into new roles and responsibilities. As the song progresses from plaintive balladry to groovy rocker, the lyrics shift to a fantasy of escape and adventure. Some of the lines are lifted directly from the lost classic “Carl The Clod,” including a clever bit about embracing advancing age, but the most gutting line is his conclusion, in which he essentially declares himself unable to control his wanderlust and places the burden of commitment on his partner: “Police me, or please me.” (Click here to buy it from Buy Early Get Now. It is no longer early, but you still get high quality bonus material. Actually, let’s be really, really, really real about this: If you buy it this way, you get “Walk Into The Mirror,” the best song from the sessions.)