“Solid Silk,” a breezy soft-rock song from Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks‘ latest album Sparkle Hard, gets recast as a solo acoustic number in its new music video. The former Pavement frontman plays it on 12-string while lounging on a couch at home in Portland, captured in the same soft focus that characterized an earlier short documentary about the album. (Brook Linder directed both, and a fragment of this performance also appears in the film.) Domesticity and old age haven’t worn out Malkmus’s cheeky sense of humor. When he gets to the instrumental sections of “Solid Silk,” he sings them in the voice of a child imitating a trumpet. And when he plays a set of sparkling natural harmonics to introduce the song, he can’t resist undercutting their loveliness by narrating it: “This is the touching intro.” Watch below.
