No languishing here

The set from Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks at the Roxy was a performance that entwined both past and future work and saw the band exploring the responses to both their past and future selves. Malkmus, formerly the lead singer of Pavement, has been playing with the Jicks since 2000 and has established memorable records and performances that could be held up to anything that Pavement has produced.

Malkmus mostly played from the 2018 album Sparkle Hard, but peppered the rest of the set with a few older songs and even gave the audience a taste of his Pavement days during the encore. The band opened with “Cast Off,” a song that starts off quietly where Malkmus imbues the lyrics with melancholy before crescendoing into glorious and passionate noise. They transitioned into the wonderfully drenched lo-fi song “Bike Lane,” where audience members nodded their heads in unison to the repetitive guitar. The band gave the audience a taste of some of their older work with the song “Malediction” from their 2005 record Face the Truth. With a voice similar to Lou Reed and lo-fi guitars, Malkmus lulled the crowd into a hypnotic state and kept them there until the very last note played.

“Shiggy” marked an interesting point in the set with the songs crunchy guitars and the enthusiastic chorus of “No” and “Yeah.” It is a song reminiscent of the work from Pavement’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain with all of the grainy sounds of guitar and drums and Malkmus’s raw vocals. The band played a few more songs from Sparkle Hard, “Brethren,” “Refute” and “Kite” before they sang older songs “Freeze the Saints” and “Baltimore.”  Malkmus sings “Help me languish here” in a despondent way and the listener cannot help but sadly close their eyes and sing along.

 They closed out the evening with one last song from Sparkle Hard and two Pavement songs. The crowd cheered and sang along to Malkmus’s chorus “Oh my God” in “Shady Lane” and danced under the sparkling sound of bell chimes in “In the Mouth of a Desert.”

Setlist:

1. Cast Off
2. Bike Lane
3. Malediction
4. Cinnamon and Lesbians
5. Future Suite
6. Stick Figures in Love
7. Solid Silk
8. Shiggy
9. Witch Mountain Bridge
10. Brethren
11. Refute
12. Kite
13. Freeze the Saints
14. Baltimore

Encore:

15. Middle America
16. Shady Lane
17. In the Mouth a Desert