Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks – Wig Out At Jagbags

Putting on a new Stephen Malkmus and The Jicks album is like slipping into an old sweater to beat out the winter chill; you know it’s going to be a comfortable experience, but you notice new stains on the fabric every now and then. Unfortunately, like that sweater, the Jicks can sometimes be something you take for granted – guaranteed to bring out a reliably decent new LP at the start of every other year, which you file away after a couple of months, possibly remembering to include it in your end-of-year rundown.

The nadir was 2011’s Beck-produced Mirror Traffic, which seemed all too eager to rub its left-turns in your face: the jarring coda of “Tigers” derailed an otherwise glorious pop stroll, that ill-fitting key change kept “Long Hard Book” from true bliss and, with a couple years’ remove, we can surely all agree that “Senator” suffered from one too many “blowjobs”. Each listen seemed to summon a hologram of Stephen Malkmus, smugly watching over you, waiting for you to acknowledge each facet of his madcap genius. So maybe it’s the fact we were all expecting another jam-packed record (Malkmus and co seem to alternate between pop concision and fretwank sprawl with each album), or just that the songs are particularly great this time around, but Wig Out at Jagbags is simply a joy to behold. Smoothing out Mirror Traffic’s rougher edges, the sixth Jicks LP finally delivers on the greatness their frontman always insisted they had in them.

Lead single “Lariat” may have been a surprisingly low-key introduction to this Wig Out, but its relaxed charm and nostalgic, referential lyrics (his cap is doffed to Mudhoney, The Grateful Dead, Sun City Girls and Bongwater in the space of two lines) are pretty representative. Yes – there’s still a fair amount of humour and confusing pop-culture shout-outs to be found here; quite why “Houston Hades” has a fifteen-years-too-late shout-out to “all you Slim Shadies” is beyond me – other than the fact that it rhymes with “ladies” – and the twanging Mick Jagger impression that rounds out “Independence Street” is charming. Even better is ‘Rumble at the Rainbo’, a sub-two-minute tirade against nostalgia and the museumification of punk rock – “Come slam dancin’ with some ancient dudes!” he urges, not entirely sincerely – which descends into a pseudo-dubwise breakdown and a brilliantly skronky post-punk conclusion.

However, the slacker popstar of old has grown into a man who now writes music that sounds effortless, until you dig a little deeper; those intricately-duelling Steely Dan-style guitars on tricksy opener “Planetary Motion” couldn’t have come about by accident, nor the ever-evolving slow-burn of “J Smoov”. Best of the bunch is the compact snap of “Chartjunk”, a perfectly-contrarily titled slab of horn-laced blue-eyed soul – call-and-answer backing vocals and all – whose burned-out lyrics (“Actually I’m not contractually obliged to care”) belie a tune so bouncily euphoric that Malkmus even drops a “dipsy-doo” halfway into the second verse.

So Wig Out at Jagbags is pretty much everything we could have hoped for from Stephen Malkmus at this point in his career. With the Pavement reunion long in the rear-view, and the Jicks now one album up on his totemic former band, he simply has nothing to prove anymore. It’s typical Jick logic, then, that this freedom should result in one of his all-time best records. Love him for what he is, not what he was, and just enjoy the wig out.