With the release of their new album, Sparkle Hard, heading our way on May 18th, Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks have shared another taste of what’s to come with their new single ‘Refute,’ a country-tinged reflection on marriage and infidelity, featuring guest vocals by Kim Gordon. Per Malkmus, the idea was to “queer the duet,” by messing with “Nashville tropes in light of current trends in evolutionary psychology” and reversing “the classic He Said/She Said narrative, where in this case the ‘wife’ is the cheater, and the omniscient narrator enters at the end to offer cold comfort.”
Listen to ‘Refute’ below.
Modesty and plain good manners might prevent them from saying so themselves, but the fact that Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks have thrived, rather than simply endured over 17 years and delivered six albums of buzzy, sub-cultural significance, constitutes an impressive legacy. The challenge with album number seven is one that any successful band with integrity faces: how to safeguard that legacy and hold on to their identity without rehashing old ground (unthinkable), and also say something meaningful while (crucially) having fun doing it?
Meeting that issue head on in the run up to The Jicks’ seventh record involved some “navel gazing”, according to singer, songwriter, and guitarist Malkmus and not only in terms of what it means to be releasing music in 2018. If, like him, you’re a voracious consumer of all kinds of culture and feel the need to interact with it, rather than just react, then inevitably “there’s a world that prompts you to put your best foot forward”. With Sparkle Hard Malkmus, Mike Clark (keyboards), Joanna Bolme (bass) and Jake Morris (drums) do exactly that. And they hit the ground running – on air treads.
It’s light ’n’ breezy, head-down heavy, audacious, melancholic and reflective, goodtime and bodacious, and it pulls off the smartest trick: it’s both unmistakably The Jicks and – due to the streamlining of their trademark tics and turns, plus the introduction of some unexpected flourishes (Auto-Tune! A fiddle! Guest vocalist Kim Gordon! One seven-minute song with an acoustic folk intro!) – The Jicks refashioned. If 2014’s Wig Out At Jag Bags balanced the lengthy prog workouts of Pig Lib with Mirror Traffic’s sparky pop moments, then Sparkle Hard bears less obvious direct relation to what’s come before. It also has turbocharged energy and enthusiasm by the truckload.
Malkmus started writing Sparkle Hard in 2015. He’d upgraded his home-recording equipment and bought some electronic drums and had been working on the Netflix series Flaked (he penned the incidental music and the end theme song). Demos were done in one day in April of 2017 and then in May, The Jicks started recording at a new studio in Portland called Halfling, which is managed by multi-instrumentalist Chris Funk of The Decemberists, who produced the album.
Self-indulgent escapism has never been The Jicks’ bag, but on Sparkle Hard, the reality of modern life sits closer to the surface, communication cutting to the chase whether it’s a proto-punk grind or a back-porch country duet doing the talking. A cleaner burn for dark and complex times.
Listen to previously released singles ‘Shiggy’ and ‘Middle America’
Watch solo acoustic video for ‘Middle America’ below.
Sparkle Hard Tracklisting:
1. Cast Off
2. Future Suite
3. Solid Silk
4. Bike Lane
5. Middle America
6. Rattler
7. Shiggy
8. Kite
9. Brethren
10. Refute
11. Difficulties / Let Them Eat Vowels
Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks online:
http://stephenmalkmus.com/
https://www.facebook.com/Stephen-Malkmus-The-Jicks-56710584421/
https://twitter.com/MalkmusAndJicks
https://www.instagram.com/official_jickstagram/
http://www.matadorrecords.com/stephen_malkmus_and_the_jicks
