Face The Truth (2005)

Face The Truth (2005)

“All my stray thoughts — they are unarranged,” Malkmus sings on Face The Truth’s eight-minute centerpiece “No More Shoes.” Reviewers eager to employ the old rock-crit trick of using an artist’s lyrics against them to construct a scathing review should have sent Malkmus a Whitman’s Sampler for that one. But Malkmus is no dummy: Consider the use of the word ‘unarranged,’ which is not the same as ‘disarranged.’ No one’s come in and scrambled all of Malkmus’ carefully collated and catalogued stray thoughts, nor has he cunningly disarranged them for art’s sake, in the tradition of, say, William Burroughs or Brion Gysin. Rather, they are unarranged, their disorder merely the result of intentional neglect. Recorded in Malkmus’ home in Portland and mixed by Phil Ek (Built to Spill, the Shins), Face The Truth was largely assembled with little outside interference (the Jicks were overdubbed later), leaving Malkmus free to indulge his every antic impulse. On Face The Truth, that means a crowded agglomeration of Moogs, keyboards, fake strings, and processed vocals, overcompensating for the lack of a band by cramming every interstitial sonic crevice with content. Thankfully, several songs survive the blitz: “It Kills,” a banjo-assisted holdover from the Pig Lib sessions, makes good on the promise of Pavement’s “Folk Jam”; the relatively unadorned “Post-Paint Boy” also recalls Pavement in its use of a single note guitar line that performs a sort of intertwining duet with the vocal melody (this was a sort of Pavement trademark — see “Transport Is Arranged,” “Heaven Is A Truck,” “Rattled By The Rush,” and many others); both “Freeze the Saints” and “Loud Cloud Crowd” possess a sort of sock-skating elegance that similarly recalls the halcyon days of 90s indie; and the taut, McCartney-sounding “Mama” is irresistible fun. The rest of Face The Truth often sounds like the first Roxy Music album being performed by Industrial Design students gathered round the Volcano vape.