Stephen Malkmus hasn’t aged a bit. Be it in the way his hair’s been the same since 1991, or how he still waves his arms and pinches at the air while searching for words, just as he did when leading Pavement – whatever his secret, it works.

The trouble is, the music he makes with The Jicks these days is increasingly ‘old’ – as in, it stretches itself, Thin Lizzy riff after Thin Lizzy riff, so that even the most radio friendly songs from any of his six solo albums become distended live.

Throughout his Old Market show, Malkmus and his trio of Jicks appeared to be in the mood to goof off. Opening with ‘Tigers’, from 2011’s ‘Mirror Traffic’, the singer battled with a faulty plug socket (“First song, no one gives a fuck, right?”), but soon after the four-piece locked into the setlist, with a sizable chunk of this year’s ‘Wig Out At Jagbags’ album dispatched. ‘Scattergories’ – under two minutes on record – became a more complex beast live, with Malkmus remembering all of its complex wordplay admirably. Lariat received one of the biggest cheers of the night, and ‘Animal Midnight’, from 2003, was a welcome if all-too rare dip into the back catalogue.

By the time of closer, ‘Surreal Teenagers’ – one of the heaviest tracks from Wig Out and possibly Malkmus’ entire career – the audience had almost nodded themselves into a trance. As the band took the music from quiet to loud and back again with force, it became obvious such bursts of managed chaos are what makes Malkmus such an alluring prospect, but such revelations were few and far between.

When the sound is underpinned by noodling, dual guitar interplay and the trappings of more ‘traditional rock’, any subtlety is lost. Malkmus remains an American indie rock gem, but he might be slipping into an old age that even his face cannot save him from.

The Old Market, Monday August 25th 2014
Words by Jake Kennedy