I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve really been putting off writing this review for the last couple of days, but it’s not that I’ve been lazy or particularly busy or anything. It’s just that I didn’t want to have to acknowledge that this show was kind of terrible. Or to be more accurate, half of it was, and it wasn’t the half that I was expecting. Maybe terrible is a bit harsh, but even mediocre would almost be misleadingly positive. It was honestly the first show I’ve attended in a while where I found myself eagerly anticipating the words “thank you goodnight!” And that wasn’t the way this was supposed to turn out. This was supposed to be a great show.
When I was traveling home Thursday night on the T (the subway for you non-Bostonians), a group of fans who had just seen the show were talking about how one of their friends had left about halfway through the set because Stephen Malkmus had insulted Boston. I had to laugh because although Malkmus had been somewhat chatty throughout his performance, for the most part I rarely had any idea what he was rambling about. Perhaps he had let loose with an affront or two, but I had the impression that he had insulted us in an entirely different and more sinister way. He just put on a really poor show.
I saw Stephen Malkmus in New York shortly after he released his self-titled album, and if my memory serves me well, it was a fairly phenomenal performance. After Thursday’s show though, I’m beginning to wonder: was it was truly that fantastic, or was Malkmus just milking my Pavement nostalgia? Whatever the case, it was enough to make me excited about seeing him again and, in some type of evil irony, probably made this latest show all the more disappointing. From the first notes of “Gardenia,” the entire set seemed to drown in a characterless mess, with buried vocals and overly distorted guitars. To make matters worse—and I can think of no better way to describe it—the band was just so professional. Usually a word like “cohesive” is a complement for a rock band, but I’ve never put on a Malkmus album to hear all the edges trimmed up nicely. I wanted Janet Weiss’s beat to be a little looser and Malkmus’s solos a little messier. But not only does the new material from Real Emotional Trash not lend itself as well to that kind of abandon, I really couldn’t get over how generally murky everything sounded. I’d be tempted to blame that kind of issue on the venue, but the John Vanderslice set was so clear and vibrant, completely bereft of such problems. When Malkmus switched to acoustic guitar at some point and the cloud of distortion remained as heavy as ever, I had the sinking feeling that the show simply couldn’t be salvaged. Nearly everything I had come to expect from Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks was absent on Thursday, and I didn’t get the impression that they even noticed the loss.
But alas, I did mention that the show was not entirely a disaster and that redemption came in the form of John Vanderslice. In total contrast to the Jicks, Vanderslice and his band just got out there and had a great time. And from joking that Ian Bjornstad was “remarkably well-built, like Ned Flanders from The Simpsons” to requesting that Daniel Hart repeat the “fucking awesome” violin line that he wrote for “Angela,” I had to agree with my neighbor that, “he just seems like a really nice guy.” Though they were tight and well polished, Vanderslice and Co. nonetheless managed to retain that sense of spontaneity that any good rock band should have. Best of all, the more recent material from Emerald City, such as “White Dove,” came across with an immediacy and dynamism that arguably goes unrealized on record. By the time the band had come down from the stage to perform the final song amongst the audience, I knew they had set a difficult precedent for the Jicks to follow. Little did I know just how little the Jicks would even try.
