For indie-rock fans of a certain age, the milestones come in bunches these days. Was it only last year that Pavement reunited? In the onslaught of ’90s callbacks since, it can be hard to remember. The 20th anniversary of Nirvana’s Nevermind is right around the corner, the 15th birthday celebration of the once-upstart music criticism website Pitchfork just past. For the not insignificant number of people who grew up feeling too young for the former and too old for the latter, 2011 can feel like a weird year — eerily familiar, and at the same time like some vision of a future that can’t possibly have arrived yet.
In the ’90s, indie fans were taught to be suspicious of sentimentality: reunion tours, nostalgia (the Pavement greatest hits CD — yes, one exists — is called Quarantine the Past), self-celebration. Last year, Pavement played four consecutive sold-out dates in New York’s Central Park; at one of them, it rained hard enough to cause a brief cessation of the show, sending the band fleeing off to the side of the stage. The audience ovation upon the band’s return was enormous, its singer’s reaction unimpressed. “Thank you, guys ... for nothing, really,” Stephen Malkmus said, looking out across the undiminished crowd. “It was just rain.”
Malkmus, 45, hasn’t changed much from his days as the reluctant spokesman for listeners who perhaps paradoxically took his sardonic lack of sincerity to heart. Mirror Traffic, Malkmus’ fifth post-Pavement LP with his band the Jicks, is as elusive and indirect as the previous four. But it’s also more purposeful — if not to any particular end — and straightforwardly pleasant, a tangle of impressively melodic guitar playing, falsetto vocals and disaffected lyrics.
Some of the relative concision here will be attributed to the record’s producer, fellow ’90s slacker-survivor Beck Hansen; some of it will be credited to the Pavement reunion, which was on the horizon when Malkmus wrote most of the songs destined for Mirror Traffic. But Malkmus doesn’t really need a reason to make music one way or another — by his own account, he just kind of does, and you can take the results however you please.
“Unfortunately none of us will get away spared / From the never-ending nightlife that we shared,” he intones on “No One Is (As I Are Be).” Is Malkmus talking about the old Pavement days here? It sure sounds like it — “Many opportunities come rolling off your lap / I’m not going to bait that trap again,” he sings elsewhere — but then again, who can say? The song meanders gently, heads off elsewhere: “I cannot even do one sit-up, sit-ups are so bourgeoisie.”
It is possible to believe that Malkmus writes as haphazardly as it appears he does and still feel relatively certain that he means what he says. And if his lyrics aren’t particularly linear, his guitar parts usually are — like fellow reunited veterans Dinosaur Jr., Malkmus situates most of his feelings inside melodies rather than words. You get the idea even when you have no real idea what he’s talking about.
There are mild experiments here — the sleepy country twang of “Long Hard Book,” say, or the fuzzy unreconstructed proto-punk of “Tune Grief” — but most of Mirror Traffic finds Malkmus rummaging around in the same drawers as usual, tightly wound feedback flowing gently into nostalgic patches of bright sound. “Stick Figures in Love” in particular conjures a riff so aimlessly evocative and involved, it’s a story in itself. Each note stumbles out, lines up, marches forward in aimless procession. What’s it about? Who cares?
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In the ’90s, indie fans were taught to be suspicious of sentimentality: reunion tours, nostalgia (the Pavement greatest hits CD — yes, one exists — is called Quarantine the Past), self-celebration. Last year, Pavement played four consecutive sold-out dates in New York’s Central Park; at one of them, it rained hard enough to cause a brief cessation of the show, sending the band fleeing off to the side of the stage. The audience ovation upon the band’s return was enormous, its singer’s reaction unimpressed. “Thank you, guys ... for nothing, really,” Stephen Malkmus said, looking out across the undiminished crowd. “It was just rain.”
Malkmus, 45, hasn’t changed much from his days as the reluctant spokesman for listeners who perhaps paradoxically took his sardonic lack of sincerity to heart. Mirror Traffic, Malkmus’ fifth post-Pavement LP with his band the Jicks, is as elusive and indirect as the previous four. But it’s also more purposeful — if not to any particular end — and straightforwardly pleasant, a tangle of impressively melodic guitar playing, falsetto vocals and disaffected lyrics.
Some of the relative concision here will be attributed to the record’s producer, fellow ’90s slacker-survivor Beck Hansen; some of it will be credited to the Pavement reunion, which was on the horizon when Malkmus wrote most of the songs destined for Mirror Traffic. But Malkmus doesn’t really need a reason to make music one way or another — by his own account, he just kind of does, and you can take the results however you please.
“Unfortunately none of us will get away spared / From the never-ending nightlife that we shared,” he intones on “No One Is (As I Are Be).” Is Malkmus talking about the old Pavement days here? It sure sounds like it — “Many opportunities come rolling off your lap / I’m not going to bait that trap again,” he sings elsewhere — but then again, who can say? The song meanders gently, heads off elsewhere: “I cannot even do one sit-up, sit-ups are so bourgeoisie.”
It is possible to believe that Malkmus writes as haphazardly as it appears he does and still feel relatively certain that he means what he says. And if his lyrics aren’t particularly linear, his guitar parts usually are — like fellow reunited veterans Dinosaur Jr., Malkmus situates most of his feelings inside melodies rather than words. You get the idea even when you have no real idea what he’s talking about.
There are mild experiments here — the sleepy country twang of “Long Hard Book,” say, or the fuzzy unreconstructed proto-punk of “Tune Grief” — but most of Mirror Traffic finds Malkmus rummaging around in the same drawers as usual, tightly wound feedback flowing gently into nostalgic patches of bright sound. “Stick Figures in Love” in particular conjures a riff so aimlessly evocative and involved, it’s a story in itself. Each note stumbles out, lines up, marches forward in aimless procession. What’s it about? Who cares?
Download from iTunes
