Review: Stephen Malkmus' most fun LP yet?

With Wig Out at Jagbags (Matador), Stephen Malkmus has now made more records with his trusty Jicks than he did with Pavement. Building from the revelatory (relative) focus and melodic directness of 2011’s Mirror Traffic, Jicks #6 stands as the tightest, nimblest and possibly most fun Malkmus LP yet. It’s notably the shortest since his solo debut and — note the title — easily the silliest. “Tennyson” gets rhymed with “venison,” “Hades” with “Slim Shadys,” “party crash” with “Balderdash” and “Cert” with “that ain’t no dessert.” A similarly glib wit extends to the musical arrangements: check the horn blasts and Thin Lizzy-style guitar leads of the rollicking “Chartjunk,” or the way the album’s occasional, brief jammy passages — the fake-out freak-out introducing “Houston Hades” or the wry dub reggae outro of aging-punk rallying cry “Rumble at the Rainbo” — are folded into carefully devised structures.

There’s a surprising amount of heart here too, especially for such an inveterate obscurantist snark-meister. Malkmus’ prettier, more subdued numbers have always been some of his best, but the freewheeling, atypically earnest nostalgia of “Lariat” and sweetly contented nonconformity of “Independence Street” are uncharacteristically affecting.

Maybe it’s blasphemy for some, but I’ve long connected Malkmus with Phish’s Trey Anastasio: fellow smirky, shaggy-haired Gen-X guitar icon, and noted Pavement fan. Despite its lack of extended six-string wig-outs, Wig Out seems to point to that connection more than ever. And not just because the Grateful Dead get name-checked (along with yurts, tripping and “glass-blowing funky neighbors”). Malkmus seems like more of a hippie than a hipster these days. But darling, don’t you go and flip your wig. Maybe it’s his age, maybe it’s all those years living in Portland, or very possibly that’s just the difference between 2014 and 1992.