Stephen Malkmus: Stephen Malkmus : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Some bands break up with a bang, some with a whimper and some are just the Smashing Pumpkins. But Pavement's long-rumored, long-denied demise last year was a sorry end to the finest American garage band of the past decade, the indie-rock princes who made their cheap guitars sparkle like New York grime and shine like California grass. Stephen Malkmus was the singer-songwriter at the center of Pavement's sound: the great guitar romantic of his era, a poet, a con man, a slave to love, a badly drawn boy, a flannel man-cub troubadour whose smartass lyrics barely veiled the cosmic emotional climaxes of his voice and guitar. On his solo debut, Malkmus stands reborn as a mellow folk-rock dude relocated to Portland, Oregon, and jamming with a couple of neighbors on twelve songs that sound like Pavement at their breeziest. No angst or gloom here - just the easy grin of a master songwriter kicking back and making "relationship" rhyme with "nasal drip."

Stephen Malkmus recalls similar solo debuts by Television's Tom Verlaine and the Velvet Underground's Lou Reed: Freed from the constraints of a band that didn't constrain him all that much, the auteur grapples with the problem of what to do with all the empty spaces in the music. There are tentatively eclectic instrumental touches - love that toy-piano solo in "Troubbble" and the Basement Tapes organ of "Vague Space." But mostly, Malkmus wants to goof around, winging his most playful, lighthearted tunes since Wowee Zowee. "Jo Jo's Jacket" may or may not be a vicious attack on Moby, but it's ridiculously funny either way, while "Jenny and the Ess-Dog" tells a plaintive tale of young hippie lovers making out to Dire Straits. Sublime American beauties like "The Hook" are studded with elegiac asides about saying goodbye to your twenties (best line: "I had the taste of death and many other things/I had to pay the piper with my wedding ring"). A bold new direction? That's kid stuff. Instead, on Stephen Malkmus, Sweet Baby Steve maps out his adult style of indie slop with casual grace, the sound of a full-grown summer babe cultivating his patch of rock & roll fun with autumn closing in. (RS 863)

ROB SHEFFIELD