JESSE MALIN'S recent second album "The Heat" threw a host of smouldering, real rock shapes in the Clash/ Springsteen mould and served notice that this hard-boiled New Yorker would be around and in contention regardless of Ryan Adams' patronage.
Its' opening cut "Mona Lisa" was always a good bet for a single too. Kicking off with an all-too brief Byrds-y 12-string guitar sunburst, it soon settles into a typically tough'n'tender semi-acoustic groove with a Dylan-esque narrative from Jesse (sample lyric: "Steven's selling Marijuana uptown to the Primadonnas/ medicate the counterculture, 9/11 baby boom") and the band letting the tension ebb and flow around Malin's sad, hangdog vocal.
Excellent stuff, and its' complementary B-sides are equally proud, wired affairs. "New World Order" gets a desperate, urgent makeover and its' portrayal of love and loneliness in the modern world ( e.g: "She dances slowly, totally exposed/ He hides his anger in thousand dollar clothes") is all too tangible. It's an anthem of sorts, but one that's peering precariously over the precipice and seems uneasy about backing away.
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The EP closes with Jesse's experience-fuelled new song "Holy Ghost": a lonely, boozy travelogue of touring cross country and the grim inevitability of life on the road. With its' teardrop guitar heartache and beautifully-weighted melancholy, it's enough to have you welling up and far too good to be tossed away as the third track on a single.
But then all the best performers have cared enough to store genius away for those supposedly throwaway flipsides and the longer he stays around, the closer this gritty character gets to joining that pantheon. You can say what the fuck you like about fashion, but it'll always be the songs that count and that's obviously a tenet Jesse Malin has learned and wholly understood.
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