When the Straight reaches singer, guitarist, and indie-rock icon Stephen Malkmus, he and his band the Jicks are transiting the endless sprawl of Phoenix, Arizona, en route to the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. “You don’t just pass through Phoenix,” he notes wearily. “You, like, inhabit it for 30 miles.”

After being on the road for more than a month, he sounds tired of driving; tired, too, of discussing his fourth post-Pavement release, Real Emotional Trash. But he perks right up when asked about the cartoonishly curvaceous female torso that adorns the back of the new disc’s collage-style CD booklet.

This writer notes that it was lifted from the cover of Mainline’s 1971 release, Canada, Our Home & Native Land, and Malkmus is impressed.

“You recognize that?” he asks, sounding animated at last. “I wonder about that band, you know. They have that quite funny picture of them all painted blue. I mean, what’s their story?”

I fill him in on what I know, including that Mainline singer Mendelson Joe is now Hawksley Workman’s next-door neighbour in rural Ontario, and an acclaimed visual artist. In turn, Malkmus launches into a passionate appreciation of the long-forgotten Alberta band Troyka.

“They were one of the more fantastic power trios of the ’70s,” he contends. “I’m constantly talking them up. They made a record on Atlantic U.S. that was a really cool album. It’s something for Alberta to be really proud of—especially because there’s not so much to be proud of there, at least from an outsider’s perspective. But who knows? Maybe everyone’s really happy.”

It turns out that Malkmus is an avid collector of rare Canadian vinyl—and obscure ’60s and ’70s albums in general. The stoned and exploratory ethos of those years runs through his work with the Jicks, and while Real Emotional Trash isn’t quite as attention-getting as 2003’s remarkable Pig Lib, it’s an engaging mix of gritty guitar textures and intriguingly imagistic wordplay.

“For me, the songs are primarily derived from instrumental guitar playing from a very visceral, hands-on perspective,” he explains. “I don’t play with guitar picks, so it’s about grabbing the strings, touching the strings…it’s earthy, in a way. And then I add the non-animal side, which is the lyrics.”

Some of the songs on Real Emotional Trash—most notably the character sketches “Hopscotch Willie” and “Wicked Wanda”—are more coherent than usual for the often-enigmatic Malkmus. Those looking for plot, however, will continue to be either frustrated or intrigued by his inward-looking writing style.

“I don’t see myself as a Ray Davies, like a chronicler of some subculture,” he says. “It would be kind of precious of me to make a whole album like that.”

Instead, Malkmus is just as happy to write twisted ditties like the new record’s “Elmo Delmo”, which he describes as “confusing”. “It doesn’t really mean anything, that song,” he confesses. “There’s some cool ideas, I think, and there’s some visual imagery that I relate to. But if you tried to force a narrative into a song like ‘Elmo Delmo’, it would be like putting a round peg in a square hole.”

Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks play Richard’s on Richards on Saturday (May 3).