“Steve’s been a little ill the last couple of shows,” says keyboardist and guitarist Mike Clark, who has played with Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks since 2001. He’s speaking with the Scene over the phone from New York, a few hours before the indie staples begin a sold-out two-night stand at Music Hall of Williamsburg. Two nights prior, in Cambridge, Mass., the group hit a stumbling block at the end of their set.
Clark says they realized Malkmus couldn’t sing anymore, so they improvised: “For the encore, we invited audience members up onstage to sing Pavement songs. Live Pavement karaoke.”
That’s quite an about-face from 20 years ago, when Malkmus — the former frontman for Stockton, Calif., ’90s slacker-rock heroes Pavement — seemed to want to get as far away from those songs as he could. There’s a live performance clip toward the end of Slow Century, Lance Bangs’ 2002 doc about Pavement, in which Malkmus — his expression, as it often is, somewhere between a smirk and a sigh — points to a set of handcuffs dangling from his mic stand. “These symbolize what it’s like to be in a band,” he says.
“If we ever did any Pavement song,” says Clark with a laugh, referring to his early days with Malkmus, “it’d be a super-obscure B-side, from [’93 rarities comp] Westing or whatever.”
With the aid of time and maturity, Pavement eventually re-formed from 2008 to 2010, and they handled the proceedings pretty much perfectly. The band got its due, headlining venues larger than they ever had the first time around, while a new generation of fans got the chance to sing along to college-radio classics like “Gold Soundz,” “Summer Babe” and “Shady Lane.” Wrongs were righted, old scores settled, and the members got out without caving to the temptation of risking their legacy with a reunion album.
So, tour sickness aside, Malkmus is doing well these days. So well, in fact, that fans who ate up his 2001 self-titled debut and 2003’s Pig Lib (the first one under the Jicks moniker) had begun to wonder if he’d gotten too comfortable. Decidedly jammy in feel, the post-Pig Lib records gave Malkmus the space he needed to really soar as a guitar player. Just as with Pavement’s ultra-prolific peers Guided by Voices, you could always count on each new Jicks LP for a handful of solid songs.
With 2014’s Wig Out at Jagbags, the number of Jicks’ records topped the number of Pavement records — six albums to five. But the buzz had faded, and the music was getting less memorable. Malkmus doesn’t make bad records, but it did seem like the man responsible for canonical indie-rock works like 1991’s Slanted and Enchanted had become a little, well, disenchanted.
Some credit the current political climate for jerking veteran artists out of complacency. Whatever the reason, several of the bands from Pavement’s era — Superchunk, The Breeders and GBV among them — have come back strong in 2018 with their most vital, passionate work in years. And thanks to the seventh Jicks LP, Sparkle Hard, you can add Malkmus to that list.
The group had gone on location for its past three albums: 2008’s Real Emotional Trash was recorded in Montana and Chicago; 2011’s Mirror Traffic was done with Beck in L.A.; and Wig Out was cut in Belgium. But for Sparkle, the foursome — Malkmus, Clark, bassist Joanna Bolme (who’s been with the group since 2000) and drummer Jake Morris (who joined in 2011) — stayed put in their home base of Portland, Ore. That turned out to be a good call.
Track for track, the 11-song set is the group’s most cohesive work since Pig Lib. The sequencing is spot-on, the songwriting quality is high, and the novelty factor is low. From piano-driven opener “Cast Off,” which hangs out on a quintessentially lazy Malkmus groove, to the rambling country of “Middle America,” the blown-out party rock of “Shiggy,” and the gorgeous, contemplative, string-laden “Solid Silk,” the band plays with a fervor and a clarity of intent we haven’t heard on a Jicks record in a long time — maybe ever.
As for playing live and touring, Malkmus & Co. continue to have fun with their middle-aged-band status while paying it forward. When they were supporting Wig Out, they brought along Philly-via-New England crew Speedy Ortiz, who came up as proud Pavement acolytes but now claim their own niche in the indie-rock landscape. This time, they’ve got Lithics in tow; they’re a minimalist Portland four-piece whose Kill Rock Stars debut Mating Surfaces is generating serious buzz among post-punk heads.
“I try not to get too far into Steve’s head, but I think he’s happy,” Clark says. “I always wonder if he wishes we were playing bigger shows, the theater circuit instead of the club circuit, but I think we’d all rather play a packed, smallish club to an enthusiastic crowd than one of those gigs where people come, sit out on the lawn with their wine and cheese — or a half-empty theater at 6 o’clock.”
