Stephen Malkmus: Real Emotional Trash : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Stephen Malkmus fans divide into Pig Lib fans or Face the Truth fans, the same way Pavement fans split into Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain or Wowee Zowee partisans: Either you like the guy best when he zones out on the guitar for hours at a time, mumbling and rambling and diddling around, or you prefer his brief, quirky song fragments. Last time, on 2005's Face the Truth, he offered a bunch of cute freak-folk ditties — a timely career move yet not such a memorable album. But Real Emotional Trash is a fantastic psychedelic feast, full of cosmic guitar crackle and electric piano and batshit poetry. It's the album Malkmus has been driving at ever since he learned how to rip off the Velvet Underground and Quicksilver Messenger Service at the same time — a full-body baptism in John Cipollina's bong water.

Guitar reveries like "Baltimore," "Dragonfly Pie" and the road-tripping title jam ramble on for six or seven or even ten minutes; the only one that drags, "Gardenia," is the only one under three minutes. The Jicks add the flesh-and-blood band interaction that was so key to Pig Lib, including ex-Sleater-Kinney drum goddess Janet Weiss. "Out of Reaches" revamps early Pavement's elegiac hum; "We Can't Help You" is a Basement Tapes-style ballad with perfect femme harmonies; "Elmo Delmo" fuses the Grateful Dead's "Cryptical Envelopment" with Sonic Youth's "Karen Koltrane."

In "Dragonfly Pie," when Malkmus sings, "Of all my stoned digressions/Some have mutated into the truth," it's notable as (1) the opening couplet on the album and (2) the last halfway coherent thing he says for the next hour or so. But that's for the best, as Malkmus hasn't taken the lyrics too seriously since Pavement broke up, and any statement heavier than the throwaway jokes here ("Made it back to Frisco in the vanity chest/To the painted ladies on house arrest") would just get in the way. All he wants to do is surrender to the lightheaded rush of the music, and the results are downright glorious.