Face the Truth

by

Stephen Malkmus

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When I think of pop, I think disposable but catchy music. Well, Malkmus could not be more catchy and listenable if he really really tried, but there are enough quirks and jerks to avoid the mainstream overkill that makes most music exhausting and thus disposable. You'll sing along everytime and still hear new things that will give you smirky smiles and force you to declare to everyone that Stephen Malkmus is a freakin' genius. Your friends will shake their heads, turn up their radios and miss out on the most listenable and inventive music since four lads from Liverpool landed on American soil. Really.

From everything I've read about this album, most people agree it's Malkmus's best to date, a major return to form after the psych-pop noodlings of "Stephen Malkmus" and "Pig Lib."

I've tried hard to hear it that way, but must be living in some parallel universe. There are some worthy tunes here, sure, but there were on the last couple records too (I think if you compiled the best songs from all three Jicks releases, you'd have one heck of a classic). This one seems to follow the others in oscillating kind of senselessly between soft pop 30-something musings and proggy excursions into electro-synth weirdness with one foot in Zappa and the other in the Krautrock kosmische music that, in all fairness, Malkmus has championed since Pavement's early days. I don't mind the out-there stuff, and I like some of the pop, but I wouldn't make exaggerated claims for either one. It's fun, it's pleasant, but ... O.K., I'll say it. It just doesn't raise the top off my head and pour radiant sonic goodness inside the way Pavement did even on their bad days.

So much about post-Pavement Malkmus is great. The voice is still there, the genius for arrangement, the inventive, witty guitar quotes that fall just this side of irony. But Face the Truth somehow doesn't manage to be more than the sum of its parts. Maybe the Jicks are too tight, or too reverent in the presence of Stephen or something, but I miss the sloppy grandeur of the old band. Now go ahead and slay me on the votes ... then buy it and make up your own mind.