Permafrost

Description

Permafrost is a solo album by the American singer and songwriter Bill Mallonee of Vigilantes of Love fame, independently released on his own label Meat Market Records in August 2006. The album was recorded at Track Pipe, Athens, GA, and produced by Bill Mallonee and Ben Holst. Featuring Victory Garden, which is Bill Mallonee on lead vocals and guitars, Muriah Rose on keyboards and backing vocals, Bill Pratt on pedal steel guitar, and a rhythm section consisting of Ben Holst and Jeff Reilly on bass and drums respectively.

Great songwriters have an ability to make you identify with the characters and situations contained within their songs. Even if the lyrics are not actually autobiographical, they certainly feel that way, even if the song is reported from a third person perspective. The inherent difference with Bill Mallonee is that you rarely get the sense that the words could be about anyone else but him. This narcissism is a double edged sword: it provides us with wonderful music, but often a bittersweet melancholia at the man’s continuing struggle against his own worst devices.

Permafrost is, in a manner of speaking, like a “greatest hits” package for Mallonee. It represents his periodic musical schizophrenia well, careening from Americana to Brit pop to country to ’70’s guitar rock and touches on almost every style he has tried over the last fifteen or so years. Like one of his heroes, Neil Young, Mallonee somehow manages to make all of these disparate approaches mesh into a cohesive unit.

«Pristine» reflects the internal questions we all feel at times, and strongly recalls an earlier VOL song, «Who Knows When the Sunrise Will Be?»:

Cause the beginnings are waves never ending
and the endings are breaking in fits and starts
and the shards of our mistakes, they’re on magnetic tape
and the meter’s peggin’ red in our static-y little hearts.

If Edwin McCain can credibly pull off «Struggleville» and «Babylon» on his latest record, I strenuously advise Neil Young to cover «Threadbare» on his next album. Clocking in at just over seven minutes and featuring what Mallonee calls his first guitar solo, it is a painfully revealing track about a man questioning his station in life while feeling beaten up.

«Bank» and «Flowers» stand up against any previous material, and «Tourniquet» tips its hat to the Fetal Position/Locket Full of Moonlight years. «Collateral» could be a Summershine outtake, and about four of the tunes have (almost) an Audible Sigh feel to them. In Muriah Rose, it seems that Bill has found his Julie Miller – her backing vocals, while perhaps a bit overused, lend themselves well to most of the songs here.

The only potential drawbacks here (other than the album consisting of only nine songs) is that one occasionally gets the feeling that “I’ve been here before.” With Mallonee, what you see is what you get. Sometimes watching an artist (or ourselves) go through the same cycles in life can be wearying. And at other times, we need to re-open our wounds in order to let real healing take place. [Brian A. Smith, The Phantom Tollbooth, 30. September 2006]

CD tracklist:

01. Pour, Kid… – 3:34
02. Tourniquet – 4:24
03. Threadbare – 7:04
04. Bank – 5:11
05. Stay With Me – 3:40
06. Colateral – 3:04
07. Pristine – 5:54
08. Flowers – 4:20
09. Rationale – 4:03

Note: Available at: https://billmalloneemusic.bandcamp.com/album/permafrost-victory-garden