Bill Mallonee’s GLIMMER Vol. 1

John Thompson Bill Mallonee, vigilantes of love June 19, 2024

Glimmer (Vol. 1)

Bill Mallonee

Independent

When a songwriter amasses a collection of over 80 albums over 30+ years, he or she will invariably develop a formidable toolbox from which to draw. Bill Mallonee is exactly such an artist. His latest, Glimmer, finds the largely self-reliant Southwestern troubadour wielding images and licks like they ain’t no thing. Like a photographer with an infinite supply of film and an addiction to the lens, or a street performer with a musician’s union card, Mallonee seems like one of those characters from a movie who might prefer to sing his bar order to you rather than speak it. Why tell you how he’s feeling when he can show you a word picture that’s sitting right there in the front-left pocket of his pearl-snap shirt?

The set opens convincingly with “Not Enough Bandages (In The Infirmary)”. The central image – one of bleeding of course – could be seen as really, really bad news. Somehow, however, the desolation of which the singer laments sounds like good news. Something must die for something else to be born. This dizzying and annoying juxtaposition between death and life, logic and love, meaning and despair, will return throughout the album. Why can’t we just stay young? Back to Mallonee’s toolbox. It’s amazing that after this many projects he hasn’t run out of images with which to explore human nature, futility, and hope. But track after track the imagery abounds. “Pillar To Post,” “True Blue,” “Finger In The Wound,” “This Side Of The Veil,” and “Eye To Eye & Heart To Heart,” will all satisfy Mallonee’s faithful fans. It would be amazing to hear some younger artists cover these songs.

Bill Mallonee is an anomaly in all the right ways. Those of us who have been listening since his band, Vigilantes Of Love, were Georgia’s sure-fire next big thing in roots-rock alt-country 30+ years ago, will no doubt catch some differences in his now nearly 70-year-old voice and his home-spun production. These days his vocal approach is more Steve Forbert than Steve Earle – and if you listen closely, you can hear every string, strum, and cymbal echo off his New Mexico home studio walls. His near-constant use of a lap-steel guitar – in very lick-heavy and non-traditional ways – keeps things just so slightly unsettled. There are at least 16 conventional guitar strings (acoustic, bass, and electric,) rattling and vibrating on every track. Instead of playing romantic swells and budget pedal steel licks, Mallonee’s lap-steel is constantly in motion. He plays it the way he plays his acoustic. It ambles – often uncommitted to the exact tonic note. Being fretless, the thing is free to slide, glide, and grind against the “pretty” notes. It creates an atmospheric, often ungrounded effect that suits the confessional and brutally self-aware lyrics perfectly. As most of Mallonee’s recent projects have been, Glimmer is just the right amount off-center – just the proper bit haunted or twisted.

Some may miss the compression and punch of the “old days.” I, for one, find this collection to be sturdy, inviting, and compelling. It would be incorrect to call this “outsider art” as it is not naïve at all, and Mallonee’s skill as a crafter of lyric and lick are obvious. But there is something outsider-ish about it, that’s for sure. It draws me in – like a weathered singer playing on a warm afternoon with a small band in a roadhouse bar somewhere between Georgia and California, not like a rock band up on a club stage showing no mercy. On this road trip, at this age, I’ve lost track of which state I’m in and where I’m going. The bearded bard up on the dusty stage is not quite a country singer, and not quite a folk singer. He’s all of that – plus he might be some kind of priest. I can’t tell what he is – but I can tell he’s been places and has some stories to tell. I sit down and order a drink.