4/4/08 - Stephen Malkmus @ the Mass Moca

The Mass MoCA is an amazing contemporary arts complex located in the sleepy mountain town of North Adams, MA smack dab in the heart of the Berkshires. It resides in a 13 acre lot in the downtown area that used to be home to factories and mills. The complex provides a great venue for visual, perfomance and media arts and as Stephen Malkmus put it “ this is a great use of tax dollars”. Malkmus and his band, the Jicks, played their brand of jammed out indie rock at the Hunter Center, the MoCA’s Fillmore sized concert auditorium.

Drawing heavily from their new album, Real Emotional Trash, Malkmus lead his band through a pretty standard set. Albeit very exploratory to the untrained ear, all of the “jams” were basically note for note versions of their album versions. The only true improv I noticed was a dark spacy outtro to the idiosyncratic melodic pop found in “It Kills”.

Malkmus’ unassuming banter was refreshing as he would tell funny stories, crack jokes with his bandmates and answer some of the crowd’s questions (he even riffed on a little Sabbath when someone shouted “play Ironman!”). After they played “We Can’t Help You”, Malkmus entertained us with a celebrity encounter that could only happen to him. Apparently basketball star Manute Bol had called him recently and told him how much he loved Stephen’s music and thought of “We Can’t Help You” as his theme song every time a prospective donator declined to support one his various non-profit programs.

After the standard set (in regards to what songs were played), the Jicks let their hair down a little by jamming on a funny arabic themed jam while introducing eachother to start the encore (see video below). Then they delved into their back catalogue with two songs from his middle two solo releases and one unreleased song which I had never heard before. If you take the show for what it was, than it was a well executed, fun set of completely original music. It’s just hard to digest when I know he has four albums under his belt (not to mention Pavement's whole catalog, but he doesn't play those songs anymore) but still played 80% new material during the main set of his show. I know that this is standard issue in the music biz but sometimes its nice to be a little left of center, somewhere I know Malkmus has resided his entire career.


Set List: Dragonfly Pie, Gardenia, It Kills, Elmo Delmo, Cold Son, Baltimore, We Can’t Help You, Water and a Seat, Hopscotch Willie, Wicked Wanda, Real Emotional Trash

E: band introductions, Pencil Rot, Run Lady Run*, Vanessa From Queens

* not sure of title. John Vanderslice opened the show.



Thanks to pineapplecircus for the youtube videos.