Some bands make their journey to the Fountain of Rockness to take a sip or two; others merely to gargle. But the Hard Quartet dip their four sets of lips into those waters and drink deep. They gather together for an indie-rock supergroup of kindred spirits, resulting in a shaggily delightful album of casual guitar kicks. In this corner: Stephen Malkmus, from Pavement and the Jicks. In that one: Matt Sweeney, from Chavez and Superwolf. They’re joined by Dirty Three drum legend Jim White and Ty Segall bassist Emmett Kelly. The Hard Quartet is a group that had to happen — a Matador Wilburys-style combo, where listening means just hanging out and soaking up the friendly vibe.
Malkmus and Sweeney are two of the hardest-working and least predictable artists to emerge from the Nineties guitar-band explosion. They’ve been in more supergroups than actual groups. One wrote the most famous song to question the existential mission of the Smashing Pumpkins; the other was in Billy Corgan’s short-lived Zwan.
They combine here for the kind of crackpot rock mayhem they whipped up on Malkmus’ 2020 Traditional Techniques, with Sweeney joining in for a fractured hippie-folk experiment. Since the Trad Tech band was a live project that never left the garage — the album dropped in the first days of the pandemic—the duo make up for lost time here.
The Hard Quartet kick off their album with a barrage of Seventies rock head-slammers, with the AC/DC-gone-glam surge of “Chrome Mess,” offering a prayer up to “Sister Sludge.” Sweeney adds “Rio’s Song,” with its Chavez-like harmonies and cryptic riddles. (“For how long and how high do we ride/While we wait for the shade to reply?”) For the video, they remade the Stones’ “Waiting on a Friend” video, with Malkmus as Mick and Sweeney as Keith, on the same NYC stoop from the cover of Physical Graffiti.
Malkmus plays some nifty Richard Thompson-style guitar in the excellent “Heel Highway,” the kind of sparkly ballad he can and probably did write in his sleep, with bongwater poetry in the mode of the the Jicks’ Pig Lib or Real Emotional Trash. (“Rustling up some liquid hash/Custom made so colors flash,” that kind of thing.)
But the Hard Quartet get even more fun in the second half, when they assume you’ve stopped paying attention. The songs get looser, longer, shaggier. “Jacked Existence” is a fantastic acoustic dirge in the dank mode of Traditional Techniques. But Malk sings some surprise ballads in one of his favorite lyric modes: the unlikely life coach he’s played from “Major Leagues” to “Malediction,” from “Share the Red” to “Middle America.” As in those songs, he offers pep talks on reaching outside your world to make some scary human connections, such as “Hey” and “Six Deaf Rats,” where he admits, “I wasn’t made to be unfazed by all I see/Fazin’ the fratboys, that was a joke to me.”
Pavement did a one-off NYC gig this week, promoting the new Alex Ross Perry mock documentary about the band, Pavements; they celebrating by revisiting early EP highlights like “Debris Slide,” “Box Elder,” and the unstoppable-in-any-universe “Perfect Depth.” The Hard Quartet feels like it was probably supposed to be a goof, yet it’s a surprisingly generous amount of Malk guitar/vocal content. Nobody ever knows what to predict from him, Sweeney, or any of these four musicians. But the Hard Quartet is a tribute to the sweetly dazed inspiration they share.
