Review: Stephen Malkmus’s Traditional Techniques Challenges Form and Function

The stripped-down solo album has become a rite of passage for the frontperson hoping to showcase a personal vulnerability that can often be obscured when leading a band through a haze of rock pyrotechnics. Think John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band or Thurston Moore’s Demolished Thoughts. What’s surprising about Stephen Malkmus’s Traditional Techniques isn’t that it took more than 30 years for him to record this kind of album, but that he’s employed a psych-folk format reminiscent of Alexander “Skip” Spence to recontextualize the same oblique wisecracks, intellectual wordplay, and wry character studies that have defined his work with Pavement and the Jicks. Anyone expecting Malkmus to finally wear his heart on sleeve will be sorely disappointed.

A marked departure from last year’s Groove Denied, Malkmus’s long-gestated foray into experimental electronics, Traditional Techniques is less a revealing personal statement than a change of palette, with the singer-songwriter coloring his usual sarcastic wit with somber, muted tones. The opening track, “ACC Kirtan,” is a dour exercise in Indian instrumentation that makes the Beatles’s dirge “Within You Without You” sound like “Good Day Sunshine.” Yet within a dark fog of sitar, tabla, and woodwinds, Malkmus offers lines like “The Duraflame’s wet/The ganache won’t set/Where are the rings for my sweet serviettes?” as if the musical backdrop were a luxurious affectation rather than a journey into exotic mysticism. The joke-within-a-joke of “ACC Kirtan” comes from his deadpan commitment to the trappings of Eastern-tinged psychedelia; the song goes on for more than six mesmerizing minutes, though it invites our laughter at its pretentious narrator we become immersed in his artificial world.

Ersatz spirituality may be one of the key themes of the album, which was co-recorded by Decemberists guitarist Chris Funk and aided by contributions from Joy Pearson, Matt Sweeney, and Qais Essar. Lead single “Xian Man” is the most Jicks-like cut here, its pace brisk, its rhythm jaunty, and its sitar textures beautifully intertwined with Malkmus’s signature fuzz-guitar riffing. The light yet disorienting trippiness buttresses an ironic commentary on the meaninglessness of Christianity in the 21st century, or so it appears: Lyrics like “I’m Miles Davis better than any of you/Leaving no thumbprints for the love of a Christian man” are subject to any number of interpretations. But even if Malkmus is just minting absurdisms, it’s no coincidence that “Christian” is misspelled in the song’s title or that a love of Jesus Christ is associated with baffling and misleading non sequiturs. Whatever Malkmus’s intent with “Xian Man,” the song highlights his masterful use of vintage sounds for bizarre new purposes.

One of those purposes is the juxtaposition of hip modern lingo with musical simplicity and sincerity. Malkmus has successfully pulled this trick before, most notably on Jicks tracks like “No One Is (As I Are Be)” and “Asking Price,” but on Traditional Techniques the irony is especially thick. A rare song from the point of view of an attorney, “The Greatest Own in Legal History” makes clear from its title and the arrogant cynicism of its narrator that Malkmus holds bemused contempt for manipulable justice, even as the track’s gentle interplay of acoustic guitar, pedal steel, and tambourine begs for a melancholic campfire sing-along. “Shadowbanned,” meanwhile, returns to the minor-key Eastern instrumentation of “ACC Kirtan” and “Xian Man,” but in a staccato lurch that reinforces a haphazard lyrical landscape of mindless chatter, consumption, and vanity on the Information Superhighway: “Sky high on Reddit, kharma fly/Over Amazon wheatfields and rivers of Red Bull/Drip gush drip data-driven skip/To the part where the left bros parody TED Talks.”

Providing needed contrast to all of the album’s sardonic commentary, “What Kind of Person” comes closest to the kind of raw expressions of folk musicians like Nick Drake and Elliott Smith, and yet that expression is couched in Malkmus’s singularly erudite and detached jargon. When he sings, “What kind of person steals in reverse?/The kind of person you can become if you play your cards far from your vest,” he’s using circumlocution to disguise the affirming observation that those who are generous are also emotionally open. He does so because a more direct version of that idea might be too saccharine when placed over a pretty fingerpicked acoustic guitar refrain, and if that sounds too disingenuous to you then you probably haven’t followed Malkmus this far into his career anyway.

The title of Traditional Techniques references German philosopher and cultural critic Theodor Adorno’s 1965 screed against the Beatles: “What can be urged against the Beatles is simply that what these people have to offer is something that is retarded in terms of its own objective content…the means of expression that are employed and preserved here are in reality no more than traditional techniques in a degraded form.” With this album, Malkmus opposes such elitism by once again showing how the language and history of popular music can serve as an effective channel for even his peculiar sentiments and worldview. That he’s done so for the first time in a largely slow, acoustic vein proves that he can change our understanding of just what this kind of music might accomplish beyond its “traditional” forms and functions.