![]() Even as he fortifies the rhythm with tambourine effects and a circular police-siren refrain, he pokes and prods it with distorted synth bleats, as if checking to see if his steak is done. There’s a palpable sense of “What does this button do?” curiosity to the opening “Belziger Faceplant,” where jabbing synth notes arrhythmically spar with a sputtering drum-machine beat while Malkmus intrudes with an atonal croon like someone hamming it up in a karaoke booth. Groove Denied channels circa-1979 post-punk not just in austere sound but in mindset, harking back to an era when machines represented the sound of the future but no one was quite sure of what do with them yet. As far as records inspired by Berlin nightclub benders go, the vibe here is less “Dance like no one’s watching” than “Mess around like no one’s listening.” ![]() But now he’s taking his cues from the primitive, proto-industrial synthwave of the Normal and “Being Boiled”-era Human League instead of the gnarled guitars of Swell Maps and the Fall. Rather than thrust him into foreign musical territory, the album returns Malkmus to the murky soup of lo-fi, DIY post-punk that once served as Pavement’s petri dish. Malkmus started writing Groove Denied while he was living in Berlin in the early 2010s, after a DJ friend chaperoned him into the city’s infamous club scene-but Ravement this is not. Now in his 30th year as a recording artist, Stephen Malkmus is so good at being Stephen Malkmus that the mere prospect of him futzing around and making electronic music with Ableton Live might raise eyebrows, even after plenty of indie-rock titans of his vintage have dabbled in digitalism.
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