Album Review: Jesse Malin - "Sad And Beautiful World"

 

It's safe to say that this new album from Jesse Malin has been a long time in the making. Although it's only two years since his previous effort, Sunset Kids (an album which I'll be honest and say I was a bit underwhelmed by), we've already had three singles from it over the past 12 months (it's been a gradual work in progress during the lockdown), all of which have been good stuff so I was pretty keen to hear what the rest of the 15 tracks on here sounded like.

Sad And Beautiful World is an album split into two parts with the first side showing off Malin's more reflective side. Similar to Sunset Kids, this part of the album is a very downbeat and mournful one as evidenced by the gentle opener Greener Pastures but if that album felt as though it was lacking much of a kick - the fact that Before You Go picks up the pace nicely proves that at least there's a bit more energy about this effort. State Of The Art is even better with Jesse urging the subject of the song to keep their head up in the face of adversity to create a good mellow but uplifting call to arms.

Thereafter, side one goes into more of the same quiet and reflective style as Sunset Kids did but somehow it doesn't seem quite as lumpen as that album did when I listened to it two years ago - put it down to there being a lockdown in between albums which I think kind of forced most of us to sit back and reflect a bit but the likes of the yearning Lost Forever and a cover of Tom Petty's Crawling Back To You sound pretty good (to be fair, Dance On My Grave definitely has a hint of Petty about it as well which is no bad thing) - it's actually made me want to revisit Sunset Kids to see if time's been a bit kinder to it than I remember.

The second part of the album is described by Jesse as being his more radical songs and it kicks off with a good one two three of former singles in the Lou Reed-esque Backstabbers, the lurching seasick The Way We Used To Roll and Malin's vibrant tribute to the former Chelsea Smiles frontman Todd Youth. Other highlights include the new wave-inspired A Little Death (reminiscent of Talking Heads in a good way, there's a bit of an echo of Bowie's Fashion in there as well) and the bluesy strut of Dance With The System.

At fifteen tracks and over an hour, this is a very long album to get through in one sitting but it's worth the perseverance as you'll notice little new things with every listen. Certainly Malin has done well with this one and it proves he's very much still got it as a songwriter and tunesmith. Good stuff.

Bandcamp Link

NITE SONGS RATING: 🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌑🌑 (8/10)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Garbage Days Revisited #74: Silverfish - "Organ Fan" (1992)

Image
  "You can't kill what you're afraid of...are you afraid of me?"  - Silverfish  - Big Bad Baby Pig Squeal I guess the obvious place to have written something on Silverfish would have been in one of the very early Sounds From The Junkshop but I'm ashamed to admit that they were a band who, while I was sort of aware of their presence at the time, I wouldn't really properly discover until well after they'd split.  I can remember the band name from the occasions they'd pop up on the Indie Top 10 on the ITV Chart Show but it was only when their singer Lesley Rankine cropped up as a guest vocalist on Therapy? 's Troublegum album (on Lunacy Booth  and Femtex ) that I decided to try and investigate their output in a bit more detail. Only to find they'd literally split up a few months before. Bugger. Silverfish hailed from Camden in the pre-Britpop days back when it was still the grimy scuzzy end of North London and the sort of place tourists would act
Read more

Garbage Days Revisited #29: The Quireboys - "Homewreckers And Heartbreakers" (2008)

Image
  "I played my hand in a rock 'n' roll band, it was my ace, my jack and my king/I rolled the dice to see what Lady Luck would bring, salvation or sin..."  - The Quireboys  - One For The Road In a way, I'm quite surprised I haven't covered the Quireboys either on Sounds From The Junkshop or here on Garbage Days Revisited yet. Unlike a lot of bands who were slung in with the "hair metal" tag in the late '80s and early '90s, I actually was  aware of the band when they had their brief flirtation with chart success around the turn of that decade and had a couple of their singles in my collection - Hey You  on a Now compilation (which sounds incredibly incongruous all these years later!) and There She Goes Again/Misled  on cassette single. For whatever reason though, they never quite became the firm favourites of mine that their fellow Soho dwelling glam rockers the Dogs D'Amour did. I'm not quite sure why - I think I just thought the Dogs
Read more

Garbage Days Revisited #90: Soho Roses - "The Third And Final Insult" (1989)

Image
  "If you won't love me then I'll find someone who will!"  - Soho Roses  - So Alone The Soho Roses were a classic case of right band, wrong time. If they'd broken on to the scene in the last few years then they'd have had a ready made audience on the 21st century power pop scene and probably be regulars at Some Weird Sin and similar club nights in the Smoke. The reality? They broke through towards the tail end of the '80s and got lumped in with the dying embers of the Soho glam scene, leaving behind one sadly underappreciated album and a few EP's before self-combusting. In a way, I sort of see the Roses as a British version of Enuff Z'Nuff. Not so much in terms of their sound but more of the fact that they were a group crowbarred in with glam who weren't really a natural fit there and kind of paid the price for it - I've always thought Enuff Z'Nuff sounded more like a Britpop band with flashbomb guitars than a hair metal band. Oh sure,
Read more