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#1287: Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks – Stick Figures in Love

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The tale of how I came to know Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks’ 2011 album Mirror Traffic is one that I think I told quite well and hopefully with some clarity, when I wrote about other song ‘Senator’ a few months back. Without trying to repeat myself, I’ll just say the record made those first few months of my fresher year in university that little more enjoyable whenever I was in those moments of solitude in my room in the student flat. Can’t say I took in the whole package, I think, even at 18, I was still adjusting to really focusing on albums and listening to them in one sitting. But songs like the aforementioned ‘Senator’, ‘Fall Away’, the first track ‘Tigers’ – which will get its due on here one day – and the seventh song, today’s feature, ‘Stick Figures in Love’ were instantaneous likes on my part, from what I can recall.

I go on Spotify and I see ‘Stick Figures…’ being the most popular song on there, at least at the time of writing this, with a little over 3.2 million plays. Just over two million more than the next one. It was released as a promotional single for the album in 2012, but it’s not like it hit the airwaves and played constantly. Didn’t make it into the charts. So I can only put the popularity down to the immediate appeal initiated by the opening guitar riff. Straight out of the gate, Malkmus lays down a lead guitar passage that soars and gallops – changing up the delivery as the basic rhythm underneath goes on for an extra measure or something. This riff comes back at regular intervals, sort of acting as an instrumental chorus of the track. Choruses are meant to be the most memorable parts of a song, right? From how I’ve come to know music, anyway. And that’s certainly the case for the guitar solo ‘Stick Figures in Love’ revolves around.

And then in between those, Malkmus sings some verses. ‘Cause you’ve got to have verses at some point. When I sing along and decipher what Malkmus is relaying to us, I come to find quickly that they seem to make a lot of concrete sense. Or at least there’s no sort of cohesive thread from line to line. I am a fan of the verses here, Malkmus delivers them all lightly and softly. He increases the intensity of his vocal for the third and final one, though. He corpses during the last line of the first verse, which I think is cool that was left in the final product. But I do get a feeling that those parts are meant to keep us listeners occupied before the thrilling guitar riff comes in again. All that being said, this one’s still a major highlight from Mirror Traffic. The title doesn’t appear in the lyrics. I’ve only recently thought of it as a way of saying “Skinny people in love.” I feel like there can be a comparison there. Malkmus isn’t the thickest of human beings, so maybe it’s a love song in his own way. That’s as far as I’m prepared to go in terms of interpretation.

#1175: Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks – Senator

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I became acquainted with Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks’ Mirror Traffic properly during my first year of university. How could I be so sure? Well, the year was 2013. I’d been into Pavement for years up to that point, and the Jicks’ material was the logical step to hear more stuff by the guy who usually wrote the Pavement songs. It was announced that the new album by Stephen Malkmus and the band, which turned out to be Wig Out at Jagbags, was to be released in the first month of 2014. Might have even been the first or second week of January. So it made sense to listen to the most recent album at that point, just for preparation.

It’s not my favourite Malkmus and Jicks album, I must admit. But there are a select number of songs on it that go up there as some of Malkmus’s best work, in my eyes. A couple more from the album are to come in this series. But today, the focus goes to the third song on Mirror Traffic, ‘Senator’, which was also released as a single, alongside a neat video featuring Jack Black and other recognisable faces. Something’s telling me I may have been aware of the song before properly listening to it in the context of the album. I want to say there was an article I read making light of the fact that the “What the Senator wants is a blow job” lyric had to be changed to “What the Senator wants is a snow job” for the radio edit.

‘Senator’ appears to be a track concerning the USA’s attitudes concerning the environment. And he sort of implies that the USA, particularly the people in power, aren’t really focusing enough attention on taking care of it. Instead, what the office representative wants put into action is a blow job. And in the middle, there’s a little bit where Malkmus reminisces about smoking weed with a friend of his back in the day, narrowly being avoided by the cops. How it all ties together, I don’t know, but it somehow works and is all good stuff to listen to. It’s marked by this start and stop motion, alternating between Malkmus’s sole vocal and the whole band coming together. Some nice little descending guitar scales pop in, and a solo at the end brings everything home. A very complete track, I think.

#1107: Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks – Refute

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The very-late 2010s were a busy, busy time for Stephen Malkmus. 2019 saw the release of his first, true on-his-own record in the shape of Groove Denied, an LP that was sort of half-and-half between a surprising electronic approach and the classic indie-rock that Malkmus is known for. Then just a year after came Traditional Techniques which was more rooted in a country style, something he’s also been prone to do throughout all of his work. And in the midst of that came the announcement of Pavement reuniting, which was also supposed to happen in 2020, but didn’t because of that whole COVID pandemic thing. What a bummer that time was. But this fruitful period seemed to begin with the release of his and his Jicks outfit Sparkle Hard in 2018, the band’s first after a four-year wait since Wig Out at Jagbags.

Admittedly, I have to go back to that album and get a sense of it again. It’s been a while since I last listened to it. In fact, I may not have heard it since its release date all that time ago. I’m sure I thought it was a pleasant enough listen at the very least. I’m very sure that ‘Shiggy’ was a highlight, that’s one that’s always stuck with me. You’ll find many live performances of the track on YouTube, which I usually preferred over the album recording. ‘Bike Lane’ has a cool hook to it. As I said, I have to revisit the whole project. But the track that’s stood the test of time for me, that large span of time… six years, is ‘Refute’, the penultimate effort on the album, a country-tinged one at that, that I wouldn’t be surprised if it influenced the acoustic outlook of Traditional Techniques a couple years later. I think what caught my ear immediately was the track’s chord progression, which doesn’t really change throughout bar the choruses. Malkmus’s melody in those verses follows the movement of the chords, and once I had that down it was very much smooth, smooth listening. As is the case with almost all of Malkmus’s songs for me, the guy’s one of my favourite songwriters hands-down.

‘Refute’ is a tale of two people who are falling for another person in their own respective lives. The first verse tells the story of a man who’s very much interested in this lady with ‘Southern-ish eyes’ and ‘French knee-highs’, and is raring to give things a go with her. The second, delivered with the silky vocals of Kim Gordon of the great Sonic Youth, narrates the same-sex relationship between a woman and her ‘young au-pair’, the former wooing the love interest with ‘Egon Schiele prints and french fries’. The choruses are a command to the public to ‘marry on’, to keep on loving and keep this human race going (at least I think that’s what it’s going for). But in the bridge, Gordon, like a voice from the heavens, warns us to marry on, but to be weary because ‘the world doesn’t want [us] anymore’. Really, the whole track is a poke at marriage and how it’s not all that useful in today’s society, which I guess a lot of people don’t want to hear – as Malkmus addresses in the song’s outro – but it is what it is. A little twist in the song, there. Nice. I try not to recite lyrics in these posts, feels like I’m just filling up space by doing so, but it’s nice to sometimes give an idea what you’ll get if you choose to press play on the video above. Anyway, this is a cool song, take it with you if you dig it.

#1046: Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks – Planetary Motion

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January 2014 marked the arrival of Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks’ sixth album Wig Out at Jagbags, which itself was the first proper record of the band’s that I was patiently waiting for. Having listened to Pavement’s discography from front to back the previous year and also had a dip into Malkmus’ first solo album, I gotta say I was hooked to whatever he did and was also preparing to unleash on the masses. It was also three years on since the last Jicks album. That too I downloaded just to get a feel of more recent work. Jagbags eventually came. First impressions of it were that it was okay. Almost ten years on… that feeling remains the same. Feels to me like a slicker, slimmer part two of Mirror Traffic, but the songs just didn’t grab me as much. ‘Lariat’, the ‘single’ from the album is the band’s most popular song on Spotify though, so what would I know? In my opinion, the album possesses two highlights in the form of ‘Cinnamon and Lesbians’ (which woulda had its own post had the timing been right) and its opener and today’s song ‘Planetary Motion’.

The thing you’ll notice about ‘Planetary Motion’ is that *gasp* it’s not played in your regular 4/4 timing. Nope. To begin the proceedings is a track that switches between 6/4 and 5/4 during the verses, stays at 6/4 during the choruses and then plays at 7/4 during the instrumental/solo break. Now, usually when you get this sort of tampering with the rhythm, you’re left to wonder if this’ll be some prog rock thing where there’s just too much of everything going on. But this is Stephen Malkmus we’re talking about here, guys. Even with the unusual timings, the tune still rolls at an easygoing tempo. It does start of with quite the stomping rhythm, but once those choruses and that instrumental break kicks in, you’re back into that familiar laidback territory that only he can pull off so well. As to what the song’s about, well, I’d say that it’s about the wonder of the Earth and how it just keeps on turning, how the Sun keeps shining, how us humans just keep on living and how all those things will just keep on happening with no real end in sight. Sounds like the basis of a classic existential crisis/dread song, but Malkmus sounds to be at peace with it all, the song’s just that chill.

Doing some extra research on the track, it seems that there were live performances of it as early as 2011 – so either it was a possible outtake from the Mirror Traffic sessions or just a brand new track that was written straight away after the band finished making that album. You can also read this interview. The whole read is worth it, but there is a part where he talks about his annoyance with the ‘yellow odyssey’ lyric in this track and how he buried it with another vocal singing on top of it. People who like to think that Malkmus doesn’t care about his craft are sorely mistaken. Malkmus’ decision to bury the ‘yellow odyssey’ line appeared to have confused every lyrics site online who tried to find out what he was singing during those parts. A lot of them replace the line with a question mark before transcribing the next part of the song.

#1033: Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks – Phantasies

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Does anyone out there have an insight as to how Stephen Malkmus feels about his early, early “solo” albums with the Jicks? I guess, just like any artist, as time goes on you become more focused and familiar with the more recent stuff and you may not feel the same closeness you once had with that old material. Would be a bummer if that’s the case, because the Stephen Malkmus album from 2001 is my favourite out of the Jicks albums to date. Not saying that everything he’s done since then hasn’t matched up to it. I just enjoy a large number of the tracks on there.

‘Phantasies’ is the second song on the album, and going a unique way in terms of a lyrical narrative, Malkmus sings from the persepctive of, presumably, an Inuit living in Karakatu, Alaska – a town that doesn’t exist – and going about their daily business with their fellow Inuit colleague. It’s a nice, little, upbeat tune. Coming after the sorta surreal opener of ‘Black Book’, ‘Phantasies’ turns the album’s direction into a more approachable direction. And a fun one too. Malkmus sounds like he’s having a blast just singing it. There are keyboard-activated vocal samples that are played like a kid in high school when the teacher’s left the room. The synth that follows the vocal melody during the verses has a childlike innocence to it. The “Whoa a-whoa-ohs” in the choruses are kinda silly, but that’s really what the whole song is going for. Silly and carefree, but still with a lot of heart.

All of this, the music, the lyrics, the performance, the whole untroubled air of it all, I’ve come to link with Malkmus’ then-newfound freedom after the breakup of Pavement two years prior. There’s that clip of him in the last Pavement show where, with a pair of handcuffs dangling off his microphone, he says to the audience – “This is what it’s been like being in a band all these years.” Something along those lines. And now that was over, it was like a huge weight was lifted off his shoulders. The whole feeling of freedom isn’t confined to just this song though. The whole album revels in it. Malkmus sang he wasn’t having fun anymore on Pavement’s final album. In this song you can hear the huge difference in tone when he was.