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Real Emotional Trash
Home > Complete List of "m-n" Artists > Stephen Malkmus > Item 9
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Real Emotional Trash
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by Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks
Sales Rank: 185841
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List Price: $19.98
$18.98
At Amazon
on 10-2-2008.
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1. Dragonfly Pie
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2. Hopscotch Willie
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3. Cold Son
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4. Real Emotional Trash
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5. Out of Reaches
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6. Baltimore
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7. Gardenia
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8. Elmo Delmo
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9. We Can't You
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10. Wicked Wanda
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As the frontman and primary songwriter of Pavement, Steve Malkmus crafted lazy, supremely catchy Art-Pop that defined the Slacker/Indie genre. As a solo artist, Malkmus hasn't exactly tightened up, but his music emerges from grander, more expansive sonic terrain. Real Emotional Trash, Malkmus' fourth solo album, kicks off with "Dragonfly Pie" and immediately finds him in guitar-hero mode, slashing out disjointed riffs and shreds. Elsewhere, Stephen Malkmus' Classic Rock fixation is on full display, channeling George Harrison via the guitar solo on "Hopscotch," while the album's centerpiece, the 10-minute-plus title track, has the feel of Richard Thompson and Fairport Convention at their most epic (think "A Sailor's Life"). His music has grown far too complex and cerebral for him to be called a slacker anymore.
--This text refers to the
Audio CD
edition.
Another entry in the "rocker loses his soul" sweepstakes begun by Radiohead with In Rainbows -- this could be called In Terror Twilight, since Malkmus has now slipped inside the irreal world he once feared -- S.M. at least goes out fighting with some of the most muscular, dark-toned and beautiful jams in recent history. The inside jacket is very revealing. The man who once wrote "Magic Christians chew the rind" here has himself and his band photographed in gypsy attire, surrounded by Hebrew script. And indeed, the fell consequences of the world's drift into bohemianism, free-thinking and lawlessness have never been as eloquently expressed as Malkmus does in this masterpiece. Most people who think of themselves as moral, decent individuals don't realize that they're actually gypsies being pushed along by the sickness that lies at the very top of the system and trickles down to everyone beneath. Malkmus' saving grace is confronting that very fact about himself. The video for "Major Leagues" where he is trying to climb a rock face, occasionally slipping down, really says it all. Malkmus' whole conflicted personality is revealed here, and it's very similar to Nate of Six Feet Under ( they even look alike ). It is classic Everyman Circa 2008. A generally decent guy who has made a mess of his life, who admonished his listeners not to feed the oysters and then went out and did it anyway, and now is stuck in suburbia with a wife and two kids in the middle of the weirdest and most spiritually apocalyptic time in history, smoking pot and getting lost in his music. He loves music, I would say, too much -- music, after all, isn't salvation, just another form of escape. It is astonishing how almost all the poetic material of the album is spun off from the two opening statements: "Of all my stoned digressions / Some have mutated into truth / Not a spoof" and "You are the bold expression of all your parents' flaws / Makes you pause." The songs on the album can then be divided into two categories, though they have a uniform, consistent sound: ( 1 ) Prophetic songs, including not one but TWO of the best jams about the devil since "Aqualung," these being "Hopscotch Wilie" and "Elmo Delmo" and ( 2 ) Songs about bad blood, family curses, abandonment, and a resulting cosmic, inescapable, fateful evil. Of course the two strands intertwine, as the devil is precisely this kind of freedom-loving individual. As Hopscotch Willie says, trying to beat a murder rap ( for Jesus? ): "Can't blame me from a guilty face / It was a gift from my mother my father in place / Of all they should have given they just left me / With this dirty DNA / What makes you think I'm the one you want?" The centerpiece is the 10-minute title track. Malkmus starts out with a somber, classically Pavement sounding tune where he sings "Daddy's on the run." The guitars pick up intensity and chime along for a while, with moments of repose to build anticipation, until at six minutes in we hit a power groove that perfectly captures that feeling of starting on a road trip, except in this case that road trip is an escape from responsibility, just running running running, daddy is running, and Malkmus launches into an ingenious selection of corny imagery straight out of the film Sideways, stuff about vans and Frisco and hippie furniture and wine country, the entire "Me" generation pinned down. "There's no more time for apricots / He's got to make his own shade," one of the free spirits says, presumably referring to the baby Malk. The song then returns to the once-golden child Malkmus, playing the opening refrain which now sounds more melancholy for the exhilarating burst that precedes it, the apricot spawn of these hideously selfish parents, bearing their curse, sinking into madness. Then you realize he has BECOME Hopscotch Willie, blaming his parents for his own incipient evil. All is not gloom. There are hints at a savior figure in at least three spots in the album, the "soldier from Baltimore," the antagonist and opposite of "Wicked Wanda" in the Inland Empire-esque song bearing her name, and the body in pieces under the pier in "Hopscotch Willie." But mostly Malkmus is slipping more than clinging on, and probably the only way to save himself is to emerge from his guitar haze. That would rob us of more albums, but considering this one is never to be topped, is musically flawless, is filled with enough tunes for 17 albums, and really is a generational touchstone -- maybe that's not such a bad thing.
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Real Emotional Trash
Available from Amazon
Price: $18.98
Updated on 10-2-2008.
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