Stephen Malkmus Airs His 'Trash' Onstage

Despite titling his upcoming release, 'Real Emotional Trash,' Stephen Malkmus is decidedly not dumping real emo trash on us, suddenly. If anything, he's rocking out harder than ever. To prove the point, Malkmus and his band the Jicks performed a special set at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco on Wednesday night, previewing virtually the entire album.

Introducing the track 'Baltimore,' which Matador Records recently began offering as a free download, Malkmus quipped that the audience may have already heard the track "in the MP3 format. But I'm an AVI guy myself."

Jicks' multi-instrumentalist Mike Clark retorted, "I'm an OGG guy."

The show included only a handful of previously released songs, all of which were culled from Malkmus' most recent two albums. As predicted, no Pavement tracks. Malkmus and the Jicks will play just one more show this year, this Friday night in Portland, OR.

With this new batch of songs, Malkmus continues moving in the direction he's been headed, which is to say, towards the center of the legendary land of awesome-ville. By some accounts, he's already there.