Jesse Malin - New York Before The War

I posted a couple of weeks ago about the imminent release of a new album from Jesse Malin, someone who I have enjoyed listening to and watching on numerous occasions in the past. Well, I have now been listening to the album for a week or so.

This is Malin's first studio album for five years, so why the long wait? Well, according to Malin himself, “This record was written through a time of personal battles and struggles—sometimes at home, sometimes traveling the road—finding ways to celebrate the moment and find something real in what some might call dead end and disposable times.” In the record, he seeks to encompass all that has gone before in his musical career, beginning when he was little more than a 12 or 13 year old kid with Heart Attack and then becoming lead singer with glam-rock outfit, D Generation.

Malin has lived in New York all his life (he hails from Flushing, Queens) and he knows the city inside out. Clearly he yearns for the city that once existed but perhaps is no longer there. I suspect it's the city of the Ramones or the New York Dolls or of CBGB's. All now gone of course.

His feelings are perhaps best encapsulated in the track 'Oh Sheena' which surely addresses the Sheena who was a punk rocker in Joey Ramone's song which brought Sheena Queen of the Jungle into the modern world of the 1970's. Here Malin brings her into the twenty first century where her years of teenage rebellion are far behind her.

I am enjoying the album yet, like Malin's feelings of New York, I detect that something is not the same as it once was. The album has a wonderful intimate sound to it, almost as though Malin is there in a smallish room with you, something I have experienced on many occasions. He appears to enjoy the intimate contact. Why else would he climb off a small stage to sit cross legged on the floor in the centre of the audience and regale us with Neil Young's 'Helpless'? Yet, something is missing and I suspect it's the fact that these songs of New York, in my mind at least, do not quite measure up to what he has delivered before.

There is nothing that quite matches 'Mona Lisa' or 'Wendy' or 'Brooklyn' or 'Queen of the Underworld', or a host of other great songs I could list from his back catalogue. I am sure that Malin has achieved what he set out to do with this album. However for me. it doesn't quite hit the heights of some of his past work. Maybe that's more to do with the fact that I have only visited New York once. Maybe I am unable to relate to the New York that he is pining for. If so, that's my failing, not his.