The Duke Listens To "The Heat" By Jesse Malin - Page 3

I don't know how these things work, man. I'm figuring little pixie motherfuckers creep in after that first play and tinker with the key changes and so on.

So yeah, The Heat took a little extra work. It's a much fuller-sounding affair, with Malin handling the production duties himself this time, and obviously seeing such a situation as being the perfect opportunity to craft a melancholic, reverb-soaked, lovelorn masterpiece.

Now, having had the benefit of three days worth of listening, I have come to the conclusion that not only is this a better album than The Fine Art Of Self-Destruction, but also the logical progression.

At its heart, it isn't much of a departure. A fair portion of the 14 tracks assembled on The Heat bare structural similarities to the songs last time around. Basement Home, for instance, feels like a sequel to Brooklyn, New World Order shares the same simple percussion as Riding On The Subway.

But the surprises are plentiful.

Album opener Mona Lisa starts off like mid-period Kinks before transforming into a distant relative of Subterranean Homesick Blues, with its breathless lyrics about "Steven's selling marijuana uptown to the primadonnas, medicate the counter-culture 9/11 baby boom" and also "Hanging with the local talent, drinking like you're Shane MacGowan".

Silver Manhattan sounds like something Daniel Lanois would have put down on Dylan's Oh Mercy, a mournful echo-infected sonnet. It sounds fantastic, is what.

The track is also indicative of the confidence on evidence this time around. Not only does it have the audacity to start with the lyrics "Opening lines, opening lines, opening lines", but also toys with the sound in an unprecedented manner. Nothing on the first album sounded so densely orchestrated, so eerily ethereal as this, and yet the melodies, the feel of the thing, the voice, are unmistakable the work of the man what wrote Queen Of The Underworld. Malin seems to have stepped from the shadow of his friend and mentor Ryan Adams, feeling his way in the dark, and whilst the fella what used to be in Whiskeytown is still there, still offering backing vocals and guitar licks and all that jazz, this feels less like a side-project than perhaps Malin's work once did.

The lyrics are better this time around, also, although still slightly clumsy on the odd occasion. "We asked for God", he sighs on About You, "But all they had left was church." New World Order yacks about "The cocaine cowboy is going back to war" and goes on to offer shards of half-awake ponderings on society, culture, "the generation" and so on.

Article Author: Duke De Mondo

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