This came out in 2003 – or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
After chamber-folk, ambient techno and electro-clash, you might have thought you’d heard all the weird-ass genre-splicing musical hybirds out there. Trust former Pavement leader and musical iconoclast Stephen Malkmus to burst your bubble by tossing a new one into the mix: Slacker-prog.
At least, that’s what I’m calling the stuff Malkmus and his Jicks unveil on their second album Pig Lib. You might call it something else — alt.acid.rock, perhaps. Either way, this 47-minute excursion takes a hard left from Pavement’s familiar and well-beaten path. Although these 11 songs find Malkmus continuing to rely on his longtime sonic building blocks — fuzzy guitar lines, lazybones gaits, open-ended arrangements, laconic vocals and oddball slice-of-wry lyrics — here he amalgamates and complicates them with intricate guitar harmonies, syncopated rhythms, psychedelic effects, spacy synthesizers, mind-bending production, backwards tape manipulations and plenty of laser-pyramid guitar-wankery. The overall effect, frankly, is not unlike a bunch of indie record-store clerks trying to sound like Pavement while under the influence of too many bong hits and King Crimson albums — provided, of course, that at least one of said clerks had the smarts and talent to pen cuts as distinctive as the stumbling Water And A Seat, the bubbly Vanessa From Queens, the surf-rocking Dark Wave and the walloping wah-wah wonder Sheets. So go ahead and call Makmus’s new sound whatever you want. By any name, the music on Pig Lib is arguably the most adventurous and challenging work of his career.
