Pitchfork

Story's textbook, at first: Boy comes home from college. Boy forms band. Boy's band drop a couple of startlingly great records. Boy doesn't seem to notice, and goes on waxing introspective as band's career seems more and more like a prematurely begun ride into the sunset. Boy dissolves band and stakes out on solo career, releasing a couple of startlingly MOR records, the merits of which are kinda halfheartedly debated-- by now, people have divested themselves emotionally of Boy. Somewhere along the line, Boy realizes he is no longer a boy. (Here's where it gets fuzzy.) Man discovers synthesizers and becomes, once again, gloriously, a boy. Excuse me: Boy.

Pardon the oversimplification, but that really seems to be what it took for Stephen Malkmus to recover his youthful mien. Face the Truth is SM's third solo album and his first to hold the line against the work of Pavement and Silver Jews. The album fuses seamlessly three distinct strains of his songwriting, which have jostled clumsily and often collided head-on throughout his career: The lanky, hammed-up guitar rock and the warm-hued air of "sunset nostalgia" it abets are nothing new; but Malkmus' playful experimentation with electronic instrumentation is a more recent phenomenon. Behind this happy clash of stylistic preferences is a subtly but surely revivified Malkmus, confident to experiment more deliberately than ever.

Experimentation, wha? If you're a Slanted & Enchanted devotee, you might read any stab at reinvention as a death knell-- even though you were probably bored to tears Malkmus' previous solo efforts, you crank. But Malkmus is underdog personified, and unlikely triumph was one of Pavement's key draws. Another was their ability to forge illusory stylistic coherence despite their records' actual heterogeneousness. Appropriately enough, Face the Truth is dizzyingly eclectic, tracing a haphazard arc and often working exactly when, where, and how it shouldn't. Opener "Pencil Rot" supernovas with a boxy, towering synthesizer that would sound at home in a Lil' Jon beat. In marked contrast are the track's whip-crack beat and rollicking, John Squire-referencing guitars. But rather than blend, Malkmus stacks, and the result is comfy sonic largess. Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain's "Range Life", which quotes the same Squire lick, sounds reedy by comparison.

From "Pencil Rot" the album leaps light years to album teaser "It Kills", which condenses Malkmus's jammy kick (see: Pig Lib's nine-minute "1% of One") into something infinitely more manageable-- a lightly swung pop song streaming with sinewy lines. The pilot ad for Face the Truth features an anachronistic female model, all seafoam green jumpsuit and sprayed-stiff coif, prostrate before the camera in a sexually self-servicing pose. As "It Kills" makes clear, the masturbatory insinuations aren't unintentional: Synths et al. aside, Face the Truth is, at its core, a great guitar record.

If "It Kills" is the fried egg squatting atop a bed of noodles, let "No More Shoes" stand for the whole Pho shop. Now, this sunset nostalgia business, I can see it getting pretty soporific if it weren't so well executed-- especially when stretched across an eight-minute, Kiss-quoting, free-soloing odyssey. Unlike "1% of One", however, here Malkmus drops a quick pilot verse and he's off. Fuck that check back in periodically crap, melody. You ain't my mom. "No More Shoes" rips for a full five minutes before returning to Earth, and when it does, it's changed. Espresso buzzing. Post-coital glowing. Ate-too-much tummy aching. A tousled Malkmus yowls like a scatological beat atop the entrails, before conceding one final verse. It's virtuosic, sure, but hardly wanky: Malkmus's guitar playing has matured from artful sloven to artful sloven capable of moments of electrifying spontaneity and elegantly verbose phrasing, much the way latter-day Sonic Youth have blossomed into punk Mozarts.

How better to follow Face the Truth's most musically longwinded number with its most lyrically concise? Malkmus's word play is generally more unabashed here than on Pig Lib, as witnessed by aforementioned "Pencil Rot," which blithers in stream-of-(altered)-consciousness: "I'm here to sing a song, a song about privilege/ The spikes you put on your feet when you were crawlin' and dancin' to the top of the human shit pile/ Shit pile." But "Mama" forgoes the invisible ink, painting a bucolic family portrait at a canted angle: "Mama's in the kitchen with onions/ Daddy's in the back with Old Hank/ Talkin' 'bout the lasers and bunions, talkin' disability rank/ No, we didn't have too much money." I've omitted the last line in the sequence because, delivered in a brittle falsetto and matched to the Jicks' taut upbeat kicks, it's shatteringly beautiful, and I'd rather not spoil the moment by trying to decipher what's being said. Other highlights include the balls-out sloppy joe anthem "Baby, C'mon" and the soft-twinkling "Freeze the Saints", which is bathetic in the most charming way.

Face the Truth might serve as a first encounter for a young generation of Pavement-uninitiated. If that's the case, congrats. I'm genuinely excited for you. It gets even better from here. But I get the sense, also, that a growing contingent of Pavement's alpha fans find Malkmus' new millennium solo conquests excessive, watered down, sappy, old, etc. Well, fuck, aren't we a party pooper? The reason Malkmus remains so vital is because he's aged gracefully; his music shows none of the sagging flesh of existential panic. In fact, there's still a breeziness to it that, while not as spry and unvarnished as Pavement, bespeaks a man who has no illusions about his age: Thirty-eight is young, and if "Oil Can" Boyd can still throw a fastball, why can't one of his generation's greatest songwriters and his Jicks master a few new tricks?

 

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