Jul

22

Stephen Malkmus- Face the Truth

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July 22, 2005 |

I want to welcome and new reviewer to ENS. Joshua is a music nut like myself and has excellent taste. Hes also quite the writer. Stay tuned for more of his reviews, today he starts off with the new one from Stephen Malkmus.
Face the Truth < ---Buy it

Stephen Malkmus
Face the Truth
Matador, 2005

I recall my first lesson in the meaning of subjectivity, because it wasn’t that long ago, all things considered. It was shortly after Stephen Malkmus (who is the artist responsible for Face the truth, the ostensible subject of this review) and his band, Pavement, released Wowee zowee. i loved Wowee zowee with all the sloppy love of the hopelessly devoted fanboy, especially songs like “Black Out” and “AT&T,” “Pueblo,” “Kennel district,” “Grounded,” which I’m name-checking here to make you think they’re classics, of a piece with, say, “Love me do” or “Hound dog” or “Thriller.” You know, songs you know by name, real stalwarts of the canon. Which is how I thought of them, after only a few thousand listens to Wowee zowee. They were soooo good. Like I said, sloppy love.

Anyway, I was working as a janitor for a movie theater, which meant mopping ju-ju-be’s all night long. My coworkers and I would bring in cds to play over the multiplex speakers while we worked– lots of classic rock and Prince, all on multi-disc shuffle, if I recall correctly. One night shortly after my conversion to Wowee-worship, I slid it into the lineup. I heard those songs in random rotation with the rest of the radio fare, and I watched my copatriots foreheads wrinkle. “What the heck is this,” they’d ask, as some scratchy, skeevy track lumbered into gear. Their irritation was sprinkled partly with disdain at the utter uncoolness of the music but also with just plain old regular confusion. The Wowee zowee songs sounded– well, they sounded just as sloppy as my love. I’d never heard them with any ears other than my own, and right there was my first lesson in the subjective nature of taste: Just because I like it doesn’t mean it’s good. Or universally good. Or, like, righteous and unquestionable, in the larger world of musical tastes.

Malkmus is a regular guy, and now that he’s not a “member of Pavement” he makes music even more staunchly in line with his own personal tastes, and some people like me are on board for the ride. “Face the truth” veers neither to the left or the right of Malkmus’s long term trajectory. Sonic experiments like “Kindling for the master,” which sounds like disco sung through a Vocorder and edited on a home cassette recorder, or “Pencil rot,” which sounds like willful belligerence, aren’t even much of a departure. He still employs all his usual obsessions: the semi-classical melodic noodling (think “(Do not feed the) Oysters” or “We are underused”) on “Pencil rot”; the epic extended guitar-offs with riffage on “No more shoes” (think “One percent of one” or “Witch mountain bridge”); the messy rock on “Baby c’mon”; the transcendent rock (think “Us”) mixed with the literate story-song (think “The hook”) on “Mama,” one of the more revelatory tracks; the gentle soft-rock of “Freeze the saints” or “It kills” (think a thousand Pavement songs, starting “Here”).

And that’s the deal. If you already like Malkmus, you’ll get into Face the truth. I’d even dare to say it’ll rock to near the top of your catalog-spanning list (”Top 5 Malkmus-involved albums of all time, from least to greatest: American water, Crooked rain, Face the truth, …”). But if you don’t already like it, my friend, don’t bother. There ain’t but one train on this track. If you’re not already going where he’s going, you might as well just let this one be. Chalk it up to the nature of subjectivity: just because I like it doesn’t mean you will, or even should, like it.
~(Joshua Neds-Fox)

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