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To my admittedly unschooled ears, this album is musically perfect. A thing of beauty. Even the ignorant can hear harmony, and harmony abounds. These songs of Malin’s are smooth as stones polished in a river of love. Every word needed. Every note as necessary to the order of the world as water, or gravity.
But this here is more than music. Or maybe it is closer to the truth to say that it transcends the confines of the album, of the song, altogether. It is a prayer in the night. It is the cry of every soul who, again and again, stares into the unfathomable void that is meaning and hope and life and death.
The old gods stalk the pages of Malin’s notebook. The heathen sin at their own peril–the waters rise quickly, and without warning. And the meek get, well, what they’ve always got. From the farm he cries out like Noah, that we may be delivered, from the flood and our ownselves alike.
These songs urge respect for the Mystery. They demand attention to every moment of quiet joy. They offer kinship to the homeless, and family to the orphaned of heart. And so what if they are uncertain? Uncertainty is the mark of the honest. Only a fool would trust the confident in such days as these.
For all his humility, this lonely angel offers us a way forward. A path back into the wilderness from every concrete box. What the songs diagnose, the man himself heals. This album, and its creation, stand as reminders that heaven is where we make it. That a life lived with honor, and dignity, and empathy, is one fertile for magic beyond description.
These are the songs of a man loved by his family and his friends and every renegade housecat. A man that when he listens, you by god know he’s there all the way. A man so full of doubt about his own place in the world, yet so loved that not a soul involved in the production of the album would take so much as a dime for their efforts. These boys is good boys, and they love Malin, and these songs, and they played like it.
That’s as good a clue to the way forward as any:
Love.
Love.
Love.
Jason Chambers
September 3, 2022
Edisto River