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It’s been a tumultuous last few years for Bill Mallonee, both personally and professionally.  Since his last full release, 2005’s Friendly Fire, the former Vigilantes of Love front man has divorced and remarried, moved away from his long-time home of Athens, Georgia, and struggled to keep the wheels turning on his music career.  It’s been a confusing period for his fans, as well, as they’ve wrestled with the messages put forth in both Mallonee’s heart-on-the-sleeve songwriting and his confessional posts to the Vigilantes of Love mailing list.  Mallonee’s recent albums have been somewhat mired in a morose tone, chronicling the life of a struggling songwriter in a way that has been almost too personal for some fans to truly relate to.

Mallonee’s latest, Permafrost, which was financed largely through preorders from fans on the mailing list, has been a long time coming, but things finally settled down enough for the artist to get into the studio and put together a set of nine tracks with a full band cobbled together from various sources.  Mallonee is the sole songwriter and contributes guitars, vocals, and harmonica; new wife Muriah Rose adds keyboard and background vocals.  Athens musician Ben Holst provides bass and shares the production credit with Mallonee.  Bill Pratt, who hooked up with Bill by way of John Thompson (of The Wayside) for last year’s brief Vigilantes of Love revival, contributes pedal steel, and drummer Jeff Reilly rounds out the lineup.

Things kick off with “Pour, Kid,” which establishes the tone for the album in the opening verse: 

Poor kid, never saw it comin’
There was the setup and the big takedown
Lost his sweetheart as the band got hummin’
And word, well, it gets around

“Threadbare,” clocking in at over seven minutes, brings to mind Neil Young.  Muriah Rose’s background vocals are among the best ever to appear in a Mallonee performance, putting her in the lofty company of Emmylou Harris and Julie Miller, and complement the regret-tinged lyrics nicely.  “Stay With Me,” with it’s chiming Rickenbacker guitar, recalls the final VOL album, Summershine, and Mallonee’s early solo efforts.  The lilting guitar solo is one of the musical highlights of the album.  “Colateral” [sic], a rocker along the lines of “Goes Without Saying,” is one of the most upbeat songs that Mallonee has recorded in a few years.

“Pristine” seems to be the centerpiece of the album.  It’s the only song for which the lyrics appear in the liner notes (the rest will appear eventually at www.billmallonee.net).  The vocal delivery is a bit off-kilter, with a staggering style that matches the lyrical references to liquor and pills and reeling from sucker punches.  The song comes into its own when “the strings come in,” a guitar solo aching with longing, leading into a verse about going down to the River to “let the current and the Spirit start to do their job.”

“Flowers” gets the full band treatment here, after a stripped down release on 2005’s Hit and Run EP.  It remains the best song of the post-VOL period and stands with the best in Mallonee’s sprawling catalog.  The melody is eminently hummable, and Pratt’s pedal steel is at it’s best here, but it’s the lyrics that elevate the song.  Mallonee paints a tried-and-true image of a flower growing in the desert, and then makes it personal with a line pointing to the hope for redemption and new beginnings that we all need:

         Flowers comin’ right up through the cracks of our broke down little hearts   

Fans of the last few Vigilantes of Love albums who may have jumped ship in recent years will find a lot to like here.  There aren’t any blistering rockers or trippy British invasion songs here, but there’s solid song craft with catchy melodies played by a good group of musicians.  Here’s hoping that this release marks the beginning of an upward swing for Bill’s life and career.

Jerry Ray Jr.  7/20/2006

Permafrost
Artist: Bill Mallonee and Victory Garden  
Label: Meat Market Records
Length: 9/41:10

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.

"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
30 September 2006