Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks @ The Arches, 11 November

With their impeccably-crafted, Beach Boys-inflected brand of sunkissed indie, London’s Weird Dreams make sense as openers for a Stephen Malkmus set; checked shirts, floppy hair and singalong harmonies are all present and correct. The quartet’s feelgood choruses and shimmering guitars may lack the ironic edge of Malkmus’ songs, but they share a determination to explore new possibilities within what is essentially a fairly unadventurous sound.

It’s startling to realise that Malkmus is now touring his fifth album with The Jicks, an outfit who have been together for as long as Pavement were; presumably because the variation between records has tended to be slight, with the sound evolving gradually from chirpy guitar pop into a deceptively complex, dreamy sort of indie-country-rock. As a live outfit, the indulgent-but-fun axework of the early shows has been almost entirely eschewed in favour of a carefully regimented approach: one that strives to capture that dreaminess, but can instead feel strangely subdued.

Given the myriad twists and turns of material like Pig Lib’s 1% of One, or current LP Mirror Traffic’s Senator, the band’s evolution into a more focused, controlled outfit is perhaps unsurprising. Nonetheless, while these songs work on record, in the live context they sometimes seem to sit uncomfortably between the anarchic exuberance of Pavement, and the kind of 70s MOR that Malkmus is equally drawn towards. It’s revealing, perhaps, that for all of the later material’s craftsmanship, it’s a song from his solo debut – Jenny and the Ess-Dog – that ultimately gets the warmest reception.