The Last Kings of Grunge
What becomes of the beloved artist who achieves critical but never commercial success? It's a question that feels especially prescient as the fêted artists of the 1990s American underground ease into middle age along with their fans. The front men from three seminal alternative rock bands have new albums out today. The Afghan Whigs's Greg Dulli and the Screaming Trees's Mark Lanegan team up for their first full-length collaborative project as the Gutter Twins in "Saturnalia" (Sub Pop), and Pavement's Stephen Malkmus releases his fourth solo album, "Real Emotional Trash" (Matador), with his current band, the Jicks. Neither release is a radical departure from its creator's résumé, but both deliver the proverbial goods by playing to their respective strengths — albeit in different ways.
Messrs. Dulli and Lanegan hew pretty closely to their familiar forms with "Saturnalia." With the Screaming Trees, Mr. Lanegan's coarse, deep voice dusted a haunting presence over the band's swirling heavy rock. The Trees's 1989 album "Buzz Factory" provided an early template for the riff-laden development of Seattle's so-called grunge sound in the early 1990s.
Meanwhile, Mr. Dulli spent the late '80s and early '90s fronting the Afghan Whigs, using his own rough-hewn vocals to cut an indelible path through grunge with his unabashed love for the carnal and redemptive possibilities of soul music. Neither musician is ignorant of the trials and tribulations of intoxicants, nor of the seedy stories and situations that such pastimes usually produce. "Saturnalia" is the dark, brooding, libidinous, and cathartic document of these two shadow-lurkers joining forces.
The lead single, "Idle Hands," bluntly captures the mood in a classic-rock mold. Surging, anxious guitars and a driving beat underscore the song's matter-of-fact descent into brusque resignation. "My eyes have seen, they have been shown / This is an occupation to stand alone," Mr. Lanegan drones in the second verse with a deep, smoke-stained delivery that sounds like he's about two minutes from the grave. Mr. Dulli's slightly less spectral voice joins in for the bridge, and the pair harmonizes like two commiserating survivors: "I'll suffer you, you suffer me / We are the devil's plaything into this reckoning."
The rocking desperation of "Idle Hands" is about as rousing as "Saturnalia" gets, but it's also as cheery as the album gets. The other 11 tracks hover in a more down-tempo, noisy, and reflective musical netherworld, with songs exploring man's darker impulses. The entire album feels like a meditative sound track to those lonely hours between the bar closing and the sun coming up, and Messrs. Dulli and Lanegan sound like men who recently spent that period in the company of forgiving best friends while trying to hide from enabling opportunists.
"Saturnalia" is an album about the search for earthbound redemption. The lead track, "The Stations," sketches this limbo out of an ethereal guitar line and a clamorous drum kick, over which Mr. Dulli gets almost William Blake-visionary when he scream-sings: "I hear the Rapture's coming / they say he'll be here soon / Right now there's demons crawling all around my room / They say he lives within us / they say for me he died / And now I hear his footsteps almost every night."
And thus the album's tone is set. Upon further listening, Messrs. Dulli and Lanegan confront an impending judgment (the haunting "All Misery/Flowers"), explore the sins of the flesh (the almost ambient "The Body"), give in to temptation (the string-powered "Circle the Fringes"), and wait around to see what happens next (the percolating electronic beats of "Each and Each"). "Saturnalia" is a thematically dark and emotionally heavy album, but it's tempered by a muscular beauty that marks both of its creators' best moments in the past.
* * *
Stephen Malkmus's past might haunt him more than either of the Gutter Twins'. Pavement remains one of indie rock's most revered 1990s acts, even though it never cracked the top 40, never toured arenas, and never moved the number of units that many of its peers did. That cheeky aversion to fame was, admittedly, a key ingredient of the band's charm and fan allegiance, but it casts a long shadow — one that Mr. Malkmus has displayed little interest in addressing since Pavement disbanded in 1999.
Not only did his first three post-Pavement albums sound nothing like that band, they sound nothing like one another. "Real Emotional Trash" amplifies Mr. Malkmus's constantly shifting identity, even if it offers all of his now-familiar trademarks: Lyrically, he still favors the oblique and enigmatic; he can still stitch a gem of a melody out of seemingly clumsy instrumental collisions, and he still has a wiggy way with a guitar solo, turning one of rock's biggest clichés into so many moments of emotive wit.
All of these elements shaped Pavement's sound as well, but two things have changed during Mr. Malkmus's solo career. First, he is a much more versatile guitarist now than he ever was in Pavement. Second, Mr. Malkmus and the Jicks have been steadily making some of America's most sincerely weird yet accessible rock music. And on "Real Emotional Trash," Mr. Malkmus and the Jicks — which now includes ex-Sleater-Kinney drummer Janet Weiss, who, alongside bassist Joanna Bolme, provides Mr. Malkmus with female backing harmonies that add a new ripple to his own high-strung deadpan vocals — turn out a heady psychedelic gem.
The album's 10-plus-minute title track nails the equation perfectly. Ostensibly about a character searching for his father, the song is built on a skeletal, lilting melody and almost bluesy guitar line in the song's first third. At the three-minute mark — right after Mr. Malkmus cryptically sighs, "Easy said but less often done, point me in the direction of your real emotional trash" — the Jicks push the music into a meditative rumble that Mr. Malkmus strafes with a heavily fuzzed guitar solo. A little more than two minutes later, the song picks up the pace, and by the six-minute mark it's become a fleet, rollicking jam backing Mr. Malkmus's narrator, who flits from Mexico to San Francisco to Sausalito.
The song isn't a rock epic in the "Stairway to Heaven" model. "Real Emotional Trash" feels more like a modest song idea that, musically and lyrically, had to be expanded in multiple directions to make sense. And that's the sort of alchemy the Jicks pull off here: For all its extended baroque jams, the album is one of Mr. Malkmus's more relaxed outings. He hasn't sounded this comfortable in years.
Thanks in part to the addition of Ms. Weiss, the Jicks are a now lithe, responsive unit capable of going wherever their leader's songs take them. And roam they do — only three of the 10 tracks clock in under four minutes. Album highlight "Cold Son" turns a discombobulated space-age keyboard line and squishy guitar punch into a disarmingly pleasant pop song. The dreamy "We Can't Help You" feels almost like a saloon sing-along spiked by the belletristic writer Donald Barthelmel; "Gardenia" is just a lovely piece of off-kilter indie-pop.
The majority of "Real Emotional Trash," though, is suffused with fascinatingly complex mini-symphonies featuring multiple musical parts, elusive themes, and the internal logic of a run-on sentence. It's an incredible experience, but its pleasures don't show themselves on a first or even a seventh listen, and therein lies the rub: The album is not going to grab the casual Pavement fan immediately, and in the age of the mp3 shuffle, that fan might not bother listening long enough to find its charms. But as long as the Jicks put out albums as rewarding as "Real Emotional Trash," they might be finding a few new fans along the way.
