At The Hard Quartet’s inaugural UK show, the music comes first

“Summer Babe” proceeded to single-handedly shift my music taste from earnest pop punk to shrug-and-shred indie kool – whipping the dust sheet off of a vast ecosystem of guitar music that had been lying in wait. By the time I got wise I was the rotten egg at the party, as I quickly realised that I’d missed Pavement’s initial run (by a good 15 years) and their 2010 reunion. But as luck would have it, Malkmus’ most prolific and experimental period was just kicking off. Over the last decade, he has given us the two best Jicks albums, an idiosyncratic Ableton fuck-about (Groove Denied), a collection of roosty psych-folk (Traditional Techniques), and – would you believe it – a second, bigger, better Pavement reunion. (Indeed, it was the talk of the music press and fans alike how uncharacteristically joyful they seemed this time compared to 2010.)

Today (literally as of this month) these pursuits have reached a kind of terminus for Malkmus. “That’s the end of our career!” he recently told a Manhattan crowd in his typically elusive way (they’d been playing a set of chronological deep cuts, so he might have meant “These songs are literally from the tail end of our career,” but who knows). This was a random, one-off Pavement show to acknowledge (‘celebrate’ feels too strong) the premiere of Alex Ross Perry’s irreverent, innovative Pavements rock-doc, a fittingly batshit requiem if there could ever be one, as Joe Keery (aka Steve Harrington from Stranger Things) plays Malkmus in farcical biopic scenes which land alongside clips from the Slanted! Enchanted! musical (Yep. That was a thing). The Jicks, meanwhile, have unceremoniously fizzled out, their last official album released back in 2018, and concurrent with this musical fresh start, Malkmus and his family recently sold their long-term Portland residence and upped sticks for Chicago.

Enter the Hard Quartet, or HQ, as Malkmus refers to them during their inaugural UK show at Camden Electric Ballroom – a perfectly low-stakes, low-concept new project for the songwriter at a crossroads, whose legacy is such that his name makes it into the Barbie movie as the butt of a mansplain joke (or, more accurately, his fans were the butt of the joke – we are insufferable!). But though Malkmus may be attracting more than 25% of the Hard Quartet’s interest (you have only to glance around at the Pavement merch the 6 Music Dads are modelling), he owns only 25% of the spotlight, having willfully surrendered the position of visionary dictator that he occupied in the Jicks and Pavement alike.

Instead, after years of teaching his songs to college buddies, Malkmus has found himself alongside guys who’ll make you say, much like I did all those years ago, “who the hell is that?” before being snapped into embarrassed silence by their CVs (chops a must!). “They’ll say that I’m playing myself down,” Malkmus recently said of his new bandmates, “but I feel like I’m with these really intuitive, genius musician types and I’m the brute, the autistic one who does some shit and they’re just, like, good at it. I like to learn from that too.” (Note: he wouldn’t have said this about his Pavement bandmates.)

Matt Sweeney, perhaps the only living American indie rock dude whose credits outdo Malkmus’, has at one time or another played with/for Iggy Pop, Cat Power, Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Dixie Chicks, Andrew W.K., Guided By Voices, and with Smashing Pumpkins and Slint members in the supergroup Zwan – not to mention leading his long-running project Chavez. With his incongruous fisherman’s hat and breathy minor-key Americana contributions, he aptly juxtaposes Malkmus on the other side of the stage.

Excluding the great Janet Weiss, Jim White is surely the best drummer Malkmus has played with. White holds his drumsticks overhand, like a jazz drummer, maintaining stunning control over the dynamics. The unceasing cymbal crashes on “Renegade,” the effortlessly militant snare rolls, the way he withholds the snare until midway through “It Suits You,” ramping up the intensity – it’s all proficiently understated, elevating every song, driving them around unexpected corners. My favourite part is the hawkish way he stares at the others... there is no way in hell this guy is missing a cue.

Emmett Kelly (Cairo Gang, Ty Segall) is the last quarter of the pie. You could say he’s the bassist insofar as he walks onstage with a bass – a Gibson SG with the name ‘Iggy Pop’ scratched into the body – but after the first couple of riffy fuzz tunes, the three frontmen trade instruments, and continue to after every successive song. Kelly takes lead vocals on several and rips his fair share of gnarly solos, the hottest of which comes during “Six Deaf Rats,” perhaps the magnum opus of the set. The arrangement disintegrates and rebuilds itself back up several times, reaching a duelling guitar climax before a diffuse outro that leaves the mildly restless crowd the closest to awestruck, the farthest from secretly craving a “Gold Soundz” cover that we know won’t come.

The barely hour-long show packs in tons of variety, as the four musicians jump from the stinky, bratty punk din of “Renegade” to Sweeney’s plaintive end-of-summer ballad “Killed by Death” to Kelly’s Jeff Buckley-come-spaghetti-western impression “North of the Border” – and everything in between – silently reading each other’s minds and seldom addressing the audience. Those rare instances of stage banter are characteristically glib and odd, though: Malkmus playfully cuddles his bass (“I love her; I love them,” he says), and when Sweeney introduces a song as having “strict Cornwall vibes,” Malkmus shoots back, “The Malibu of England.”

“Hey” is the highpoint of the set for me; and that’s selfishly because it feels like timeless, unfiltered Malkmus with sweet lyrics he could’ve sung years ago but would have obfuscated with a reference to the Civil War or something: “Hey, someone likes you / they’re into your illusion,” he half-whispers with the easy warmth of an early track like “Here” (the titles are similar enough), as clean, drop-tuned chords nudge him along like a solicitous pet. (“I smell a rat, I’m a cemetery cat,” he sings later in the song, righting the balance of the universe.) These quieter cuts – “Heel Highway,” too – work better live than on record, lulling us into a blissful, eyes-closed zone.

Usually when a band plays an entire album front-to-back, it’s to mark a special anniversary – see any band that’s been around longer than 20 years – but the HQ don’t have much choice. They play every song from their 2024 debut in order (no skips) before finishing the set with a reprise of the goofy, all-singing, all-dancing refrain from “Action for Military Boys” (which does have a bit of a show tunes vibe, come to think of it). During the reprise, Malkmus delivers the obligatory band introductions... or at least attempts to. Swept up by the groove his new collaborators are vamping, he interrupts himself and dives into a valedictory burst of giddy twiddles and bends – his guitar, as always, telling us everything we need to know.

Setlist:

Chrome Mess
Earth Hater
Rio’s Song
Our Hometown Boy
Renegade
Heel Highway
Killed by Death
Hey
It Suits You
Six Deaf Rats
Action for Military Boys
Jacked Existence
North of the Border
Thug Dynasty
Gripping the Riptide
Action for Military Boys (Reprise)