Stephen Malkmus / Jicks Sparkle Hard

Sparkle Hard comes into focus slowly and stately, coalescing around crawling piano chords that soon get blown to bits by guitars -- thereby offering a neat encapsulation of how this, the seventh album Stephen Malkmus has made since disbanding Pavement in 1999, walks a fine line between the familiar and the unexpected. Upon the first spin, Sparkle Hard seems to veer all over the place, bouncing from the finely etched pop of "Future Suite" to the Teutonic jam of "Bike Lane," eventually winding up on the country-rock ramble of "Refute," a duet with Kim Gordon, who has never before been heard with anything resembling a twang (and likely never will again). The diversity dazzles, particularly as it's filled with elegant new accents to make familiar settings seem fresh, even when they're firmly within Malkmus' laconic wheelhouse; witness his pitch-shifted vocals on "Rattler," which give the song's robotic rhythms a woozy sway, or how the pastoral beginnings of "Kite" get blown out with psyche