Jicks-Saw Puzzle: Stephen Malkmus' Band Puts the Pieces

At nearly half-past two on a rainy Portland afternoon, Stephen Malkmus is running late. His tardiness is perfectly plausible. The former Pavement frontman recently became a father for the second time—his first daughter, Lottie, is nearly three years old, while his newborn, Sunday, is less than a month old and “sleeping through the night, although she’s not eating real well.” Malkmus also just wrapped up the months-long recording of his latest album with the Jicks, Real Emotional Trash (Matador), and he made his way to the interview—in carbon-correct Portland fashion—via bicycle, a trip of nearly 50 city blocks from his home on the east side of town. “I’m not even sure he has a change of clothes,” reports drummer Janet Weiss, the former Sleater-Kinney powerhouse who joined the Jicks a little over a year ago. We’re parked in a booth at Huber’s, a local institution known for its powerfully intoxicating Spanish coΩees, made with flourish and flame tableside (“that way we can talk without having people hovering around us, listening in,” Weiss explains, sounding as much like Malkmus’ minder as his drummer). Weiss, bassist Joanna Bolme (who has worked with Elliott Smith, Quasi and The Minders) and keyboardist Mike Clark verbally haze Malkmus in absentia. Weiss pointedly cites a recent Pitchfork Q&A that forced Malkmus to “apologize twice, once on the website!” for comments about Iron & Wine misattributed to her. “He was just being Blabby Kathy, wasn’t paying any attention to what he said,” she laughs. The man Lollapalooza tourmate Courtney Love once called the “Grace Kelly of indie-rock” finally arrives, looking less regal and more damp. “It’s been a day,” he sighs, slumping into his seat before relating vignettes that highlight how challenging his adult juggling act has become. His bandmates show him very little deference—they’ve already ordered food assuming that Malkmus will graze upon whatever they’ve chosen, or not. This is the sort of rough-and-tumble horseplay you’d expect from a group of equals who’ve played together for a while—which gets right to the point. After three solo records that were largely the byproduct of Malkmus recording on his own (particularly 2005’s Face the Truth, a wild, woolly, basement-tapes aΩair recorded in his then-recently constructed home studio), Real Emotional Trash is very much the work of a band, one that carries the CV of an alt-supergroup but the attitude of a bar band still earning its stripes. “These guys,” Malkmus begins, glancing at Bolme and Weiss, “played together in Quasi—they’re already intuitively locked in. There’s also more of Mike on here than ever before; he had more time to work on his parts. And we played a bunch of shows last winter with these songs, so a track like ‘Real Emotional Trash’ [the longest composition in Malkmus’ solo catalog, a multi-part mega-jam clocking in at ten-plus minutes], you can’t really teach [it] to a couple of people over the course of a week. It takes more time to let it sink in. Conceivably you could get a few lucky takes. But a lot of it comes from practicing and playing together.”

PICKING UP THE PIECES Malkmus the solo artist has been in business nearly as long as Malkmus the Pavement leader now, and Real Emotional Trash reflects the knowing confidence of an indie-scene lifer in its stretched-out sound and laidback vision. It’s a difficult album to peg—sonically, it’s more muscular than anything Malkmus has done since the heyday of Pavement, featuring lengthy compositions that wrestle with the Haight-Ashbury sound (the fuzzed-out “Dragonfly Pie”), the latter-day British invasion (“Cold Son”), Led Zeppelin’s warped-time-signature tangos (“Baltimore”) and Malkmus’ own Wowee Zowee period (“Out of Reaches,” “Elmo Delmo”). There are character studies aplenty and occasional send-ups (such as “Wicked Wanda,” with passages that mimic Liz Phair’s profane singalong “Flower”). It’s the sound of a group having fun flexing its musical muscles in service of a few entertaining tunes. But just because it’s easy on the ears doesn’t mean it came together easily—Malkmus describes the recording process in a rambling post on the Jicks website as a lesson in “how to make a great record the very hard way.” So just how challenging was it? “We spent two weeks at this guy’s place [Snow Ghost Studios] in Montana,” Malkmus explains. “It was beautiful, a supersized mansion/summer place in Whitefish where we had the full run of the place and everything was top of the line. But the studio itself was very small, made for like a jazz combo or something. It was very new and cold-sounding to my ears. Combine that with the fact that our engineer, T.J. Doherty, thought he was a bit of a guerilla and could record in any situation, but it wasn’t working. So you end up spending too much time getting the sounds right and none of us are used to doing that—we just go in and play, you know? And it’s gonna sound good because we’re good.” “Plus the tape literally fell apart,” Bolme adds. “There’s nothing you can do about that; tape isn’t really around any more, people don’t really use it, so you take what you can get.” Doherty—having recently finished work with Wilco—arranged for the Jicks to decamp to Wilco’s recording-and-practice loft in Chicago, where the conditions were better suited to the completion of the project but still not ideal to Malkmus. “They’re totally into the ephemera of music. It’s a boy shrine to vintage guitars and equipment,” Malkmus adds. “So we finished the vocals there and did some guitars and keyboards. But it’s very self-contained. You have to stay within eight feet of the console, basically.” The final stop along the way was Nick Vernhes’ Rare Book Room in Brooklyn (home to past recordings by Cat Power, Fiery Furnaces and Animal Collective), where Vernhes and Bolme applied “some great EQ and balance ideas” while supplying the necessary elbow grease to piece everything together. The result is a very analog-sounding album, the sort of hour-long work that could sit beside most anything issued in the mid ’70s. According to Weiss, this is all by design. “Songs that are constructed from scratch in the studio are a very modern idea,” she says. “You get the drum sound you want and sample it in, rather than playing together. Maybe that’s the most retro thing about this record: It’s not some producer taking digital bits and putting them together. We actually played it. Together.”