Live Review: Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks

A solid and expectant crowd has started to fill the interior of the lavish Spiegeltent as indie icons Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks take the stage for the first instalment of a two-night mid-week residency for the Brisbane Festival. As he was wont to do with his former outfit Pavement, Malkmus eschews centre stage in favour of a microphone on stage right, staring off to the side as they kick off with the catchy and playful Tigers from the band's most recent album Mirror Traffic. Malkmus still looks impossibly young inside the smoky tent environs, and he intones, “This is like a little spaceship – it's George Clinton's Mothership!” before moving onto Forever 28, the band in sync even when plagued by minor gear troubles. As with most of his songs, these tunes rely on stream-of-consciousness lyrics and a steady raft of non sequiturs over a bed of bendy, lysergic indie rock, and the musical hooks and vocal hooks are in perfect harmony as he moves through Asking Price, Stick Figures In Love and early Jicks tune Phantasies, which remains typically effervescent. After a run through of No One Is (As I Are Be) Malkmus smiles and offers an irony-dripping, “It's fucking freezing here Brisbane! Why is it so cold?” before moving onto Church On White, a tune that epitomises Malkmus' post-Pavement aesthetic as much as anything with its slightly-snaking and almost jammy nature – soft and discordant but mainly comforting and fun. There's a slew of vampish yelps and off-kilter rhythms all though Real Emotional Trash before the comparative urgency of Spazz kicks in, which we eventually discover is due to new drummer Jake Morris – who's acquitted himself well all evening – having misheard the between-song instructions about tempo, but no one's too fussed, it's not that sort of night. Brain Gallop is stretched out for the jammiest moment of the night – unlike last solo visit Malkmus seems content with keeping songs short and sharp for the most part – before Senator kicks in and everyone happily sings along to the various lines about “blowjobs” (he's right you know). After a rambling monologue about hospitality (or lack thereof) in Brisbane hotels and some scarcely-coded requests for weed, the four-piece throw new song Surreal Teenagers into the mix – it's a semi-theatrical piece with a rambling intro which dives into the song's rocking body – before finishing with a vaguely geographically-relevant and faithfully-rendered cover of Dragon's classic Are You Old Enough?, guitarist Mike Clark doing a great job of nailing the keyboard parts. It's a different experience to last time Malkmus was in town for the Pavement reunion but no less endearing, and his solo body of work is really coming into its own. He may have been a spokesman for the slacker generation, but the man is anything but slack.