“We lived on Tennyson and venison and The Grateful Dead”, sings Stephen Malkmus on ‘Lariat’, adding another food pairing to the menu that’s already given us oysters and dry Lancers wine on Pavement’s ‘Shady Lane’ and saag aloo with gin and tonic on ‘Pink Indıa’ from 2001’s ‘Stephen Malkmus’. This time though the 47-year-old is matching his food with the books and records from his past on an album that sees him squinting through rose-tinted specs at “the music from the best decade ever” (‘Lariat’ again), and writing tunes devoid of the sourness and inertia that characterised much of late-period Pavement and his solo career.
It makes sense that Malkmus finds it easier to look back now It’s more than 10 years since he was showered “with oceans of the past” and found “there’s no time to breathe” on ‘Ramp of Death’ from 2003’s ‘Pig Lib’ Since then he’s survived the Pavement reunion in 2010 (even if he didn’t seem particularly present for a lot of it) and left Portland for Berlin ‘Wig Out At Jagmags’ is the sound of a man who finally has enough distance – geographically, psychologically – for nostalgia, even as he knows he’s too old to do it all again, “Idon’t have the teeth left for your candy, I’m just busy being free”.
Freedom for Malkmus is freedom from expectations, freedom to get old comfortably, and ‘...Jagbags’ is in many ways the album equivalent of a pipe and slippers. “I’ve been you, I’ve been everywhere you’re going”, Malkmus advises those bands following his tail-lights in ‘Chartjunk’. He’s now made more albums with the Jicks (six) than he did with Pavement (five), but it’s hard to imagine a new generation of musicians gitting into Pavement through The Jicks. Partly because Pavement’s influence is still everywhere – just listen to 2013 newcomers Parquet Courts and Speedy Ortiz – and partly because Malkmus clearly doesn’t want to be in a second cult band. Instead, ‘...Jagbags’ is the product of an elder statesman who can’t stop writing great songs. When writing with the Jucks previously, Malkmus’ more experimental tracks have had a tendency to dwindle into aimless jamming. But here he tightens the Screws a bit to make 12 purposeful, concise tracks. ‘Rumble at the Rambo’ is such a glorius send-up of a scene – in this case, a punk-rock band reunion – it calls to mind Ben Folds Five’s ‘Underground’, complete with falsetto, while ‘The Janitor Revealed’ is so delicate in its treatment of narriative thet it could, if it weren’t for the razor guitars and Malkmus’ distinctive drawl, belond to Belle & Sebastian. ‘J Smoov’, with its understated brass and fading acoustic finale, sounds like it was written wrapped up in scarves in a cold park in Berlin while the children played on the swings. This is a mature record.
Even the title is family friendly. On his Tumblr, Malkmus writen that a Jagbag is “a smeared aspersion, not profanity”. He also explains that moving to Berlin meant he could cease to exist, something he describes as a liberating fantasy. “But after two years there, we were starting to exist,” he says. “It was like an average birth, without pain.” Average, without pain: it could be the tagline to the album.
Verdict: 70/100
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