THE OFFSPRING EFFECT

[June 15th, 2005] "He had his first solid shit this week," says John Askew about his 8-month-old son. "It's the most amazing thing."

Chatting after the Menomena show last Thursday at Berbati's Pan, Askew, the owner of Portland's FILMGuerrero label and leader of the instrumental rock band Tracker , echoes the same words I heard two days earlier while watching the DVD of the third season of Six Feet Under. In the first episode, Nate tells his childless brother and sister the same thing about his son. And they both look at him with the same peculiar look I probably shot at Askew. To a person who has only considered the consistency of his own shit, fatherhood is a mystery.

But I guess it's not a complete unknown. Having been a son for 26 years, I can't imagine my life without my father's voice advising me on everything from work to women. Like any normal, suspicious kid, I have listened to what he says and disregarded much of it. Dad is, after all, The Man.

It's from the kid's perspective that rock was born. But kids become dads, and those who push away authority, sometimes, become those who embody it. As is bound to happen, this transition marks the coming of age for Portland's indie-rock generation, which includes Askew and Stephen Malkmus , who, thanks to the recent birth of his baby daughter, will be celebrating his first Father's Day on Sunday. Before that, though, on Friday at the Crystal Ballroom, Malkmus will celebrate the release of Face the Truth, his third release with the Jicks, his post-Pavement band. And it's no surprise, really, that this album sounds different.

Face the Truth is a pop album loosely sketched around the intricacies and hypocrisies of the art world, and it's Malkmus' most mature album. Musically it transcends his earlier releases, retaining the quirkiness of his Pavement sound but emboldening with the addition of intense guitar work. Here, the Portlander's masterful guitar solos reveal him to be more than the slacker saint that critics pegged him as during the early 1990s, when Pavement's unpolished sound was earning indie cred-before, that is, the term "indie cred" was a cliché. Lyrically the album discards much of Malkmus' trademark absurdity and takes aim at something resembling clarity. But the singer is only truly clear when he's struggling with his new role as a father.

"Nine times out of 10 I'm not the guidance type," Malkmus sings on "It Kills." "I've been sitting on the fencepost for the brunt of my life." On "Mama," Malkmus settles into a nostalgic, fatherly voice: "No we didn't have too much money/ Just enough to make the dead ends meet."

On "Freeze the Saints," Malkmus offers up his first piece of fatherly advice. "Done is good," he sings. "But done well is so much fuckin' better."

If history offers any lessons, then we know that Malkmus' daughter will reject those words on her way to becoming another slacker saint. Just like Dad.