Groove Denied (LP)

The rumors are true: The "rejected" electronic album that Stephen Malkmus has been telling everyone about will see the light of day, when it's released on Matador Records / Remote Control Records!

But new album Groove Denied is not a full-blown plunge into EDM or hiptronica.

In fact, there aren't any purely instrumental tracks on the album. Every song is precisely that: a song, featuring Malkmus staples like an artfully askew melody and an oblique lyric. Groove Denied is Stephen playing hooky from his customary way of going about things, jolting himself out of a comfy routine. As Malkmus commented recently in a recent video interview, "It's kind of funny to mess with stuff you're not supposed to mess with."

When Stephen Malkmus first arrived on the scene in the early Nineties, as frontman and prime creative force in Pavement, the area of music with which he was associated couldn't really have been further from the techno-rave sounds of the day. Electronic dance music, then as now, was about posthuman precision, inorganic textures, and hyper-digital clarity. Whereas the lo-fi movement in underground rock championed a messthetic of sloppiness, rough edges, and raw warmth - a hundred exquisitely subtle shades of distortion and abrasion.

Fast forward to the present and here comes Malkmus with Groove Denied - Stephen's first solo album without his cohorts The Jicks since 2001. Made using Ableton's Live, instead of a human-powered rhythm section, Malkmus's arsenal further included drum machines, along with a host of plug-in FX and "soft synths." As Stephen tweeted recently on the subject of Auto-Tune's omnipresence in contemporary music-making: "We long 4 transformation....and we humans fucking luv tools."