The last time I saw Stephen Malkmus, he was playing solo and acoustic at the Pitchfork Music Festival last summer. He seemed very relaxed and sloppy, which are two things I normally associate with both his solo albums as well as his much celebrated, loved, and (sometimes) hated former band, Pavement. However, his performance was also brilliant in its way: his between song was banter clever, funny, and self deprecating, but his acoustic playing seemed frustrated and at times awkward. It occurred to me then that Stephen Malkmus was, has, and always will be an electric kind of guy, and I couldn't wait to hear what his next album would turn out like.
One of the standard cards that music critics can play is the "band album." I realize that this may not be as 'common knowledge' as I assume it is, so let me explain. When a band or solo artists releases a "band album", it typically means that the album is tightly played but jammy, as if the band had played the songs for awhile and were familiar enough with them to stretch them to their breaking points and/or add new little emphases or accents here and there. Real Emotional Trash is all of these things: it's played extremely well, but it stretches out and has many little bits and pieces that feel thrown in because the band were a bit bored and needed to spice things up.
Anyone who follows Stephen Malkmus had to see this coming. Not only did Pig Lib point the way to this kind of prog rock/jam bandy/classic rocky music, but tracks from other solo works ('No More Shoes' says hello) did too. Hell, you could trace his particular inclination for this kind of thing back to 'Fillmore Jive' off Pavement's second album if you wanted to. Anyway, indie rock and extended guitar soloing are not mutually exclusive. For starters, Dinosaur Jr. and Built To Spill would have something to say on the matter, and then there's My Morning Jacket, who skirt the line between jam band and indie rock pretty finely. But I digress.
The real story behind Real Emotional Trash is that it is Malkmus's coming out party as a guitar hero as well as his tip-of-the-hat to his sometimes credited band, the Jicks. Though indie rock has its stalwart guitar heroes--from the noise masters Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth to Neil Youngish J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. to good-at-everything Jeff Tweedy and Nels Cline of Wilco--it's only now that we can truly say Stephen Malkmus has made a point of foregrounding his chops. It will take a live album to really see if he stands up to the old masters of classic rock and beyond but, for a studio album, it's easily his most guitar centric. At the same time, it's the first one that really gives any kind of credit to the Jicks, his backing band. Though their lineup has shuffled over the past 4 releases, in ex-Sleater Kinney drummer Janet Weiss he has found a sympathetic musical foil not known since the early Pavement/Gary Young or mid-to-late Pavement Steve West days. That's not to discredit the other Jicks, who offer solid-but-unremarkable bass and brilliant-but-understated keyboards.
Anyway, let's cut to the chase. The title track is a flat out epic, building steam and segueing into a rocking second half--I'm almost tempted to let Malkmus know that he's not in a jam band and he isn't supposed to do this kind of thing (especially on a studio album) but the result is so visceral and, frankly, awesome that I keep my mouth shut. 'Baltimore' is a 6+ minute Malkmus showcase, with guitars stacking on top of guitars to continually keep the rock going. Meanwhile, the less indulgent side of Malkmus shows up in the short, pop-ish 'Gardenia' with its female backing vocals that recall the brilliant 'Us' from Pig Lib (and make one wish he'd contrast his voice with others more often) and the early album ballady 'Cold Son.' Finally, there's 'Elmo Delmo', which combines Malkmus's love for absurdist/poetic wordplay with whip sharp music acrobatics, effectively combining his two artistic spheres (jammy guitar hero and weird indie rock poet) in one of the album's best decadent treats.
At this point, if you're a Stephen Malkmus fan, I feel like you've either accepted the aforementioned sides of his musical spheres or you prefer one over the other. If you can't stand his instrumental grandstanding, then Real Emotional Trash represents his nadir in the same way that Face The Truth felt like his best album since Pavement's Wowee Zowee. For the rest of us, Real Emotional Trash is just another great solo album that expands the Malkmus book and expounds upon the jammy/guitar hero ploy that Pig Lib only hinted at.
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