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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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Mark Mallman: Twin Cities piano crooner turns out a remarkable new album with Th
Wednesday 19 June @ 10:36:12 |
 by P.J. Morel
Perennial Twin Cities favorite Mark Mallman is back with a new album this week, The Red Bedroom. Though it’s only been a year since his last project (a collaboration with the band Vermont) and two since his last proper full length, the new recording shows that he has matured a great deal as a recording artist. While Mallman has always been an excellent songwriter, his past projects have tended to be somewhat inconsistent. Stage-ready rompers have coexisted uneasily next to heartfelt piano ballads, and the whole has been strung together by noodley synth interludes. The Red Bedroom, by contrast, is a tight and unified piece of work, with individual tracks so thematically linked that it becomes a concept album of sorts. And yes, the songs themselves are quite wonderful.
First though, a bit of background on the man: Mark Mallman has this deep split in his stage and recording personas. On the one hand, there is the energetic, screwball showman who will do anything to keep the attention of an audience. This is the Mallman who’s in the Guinness Book of World Records for performing the world’s longest pop song, a 26-hour war of attrition called “Marathon.” This is also, for the most part, the Mark Mallman who has become a favorite on the local music scene, playing sets that veer between hyperactive pop and improvised Keith-Moon-style antics. This Mark Mallman is a performance as much as he is a performer.
This Mark Mallman is sometimes at war with the other one, the Mallman documented on studio recordings. The studio Mallman is a composer of pop songs that are as thoughtful and self-contained as the wild man Mallman is unfocused and freewheeling: songs that are complex, which ply irony with deliberate strokes to build up a rich texture of conflicting emotions in even the most rocking of tunes.
The two Mallmans interact in complex and intriguing ways: together, they suggest a person trying deeply to be expressive, to get across something about his life while fighting (sometimes violently) against the usual singer-songwriter stereotypes that lead to an easy understanding of the music. And his albums tend to feel intensely personal, even though they trade in wild hyperboles. (See “The Animal Who Ate Your Heart,” from his first album, for an example.) It’s as though the deep tensions, miseries and occasional exaltations of his subject matter are grotesque extensions of his own day-to-day experiences.
It’s with such an understanding of his music that I hear The Red Bedroom. Mallman himself describes the album as “closing one chapter” in his life. “Even since I wrote my first song, I never really wrote songs but I always wrote albums. I would be writing something, and then I would say how does that relate to some other song. Eventually I’d write a collection of songs, and then I’d close that part.”
In this case, through individual narratives, The Red Bedroom presents a Midwestern world populated by drifters and the dispossessed. The album says what it’s about right at the start, with the stirring opener, “City of Sound”: “So tell me this: how do you plan to survive? / I don’t know.../ How do you keep your head straight? / —I don’t.”
The next nine songs chronicle just how many ways a body can go about not keeping its head straight, from staying hyped up on “trucker’s speed” and not sleeping for days, to visiting prostitutes and racking up debts. There’s nothing glamorous about such bad habits the way Mallman presents them; Beck-style ironic, neither. The maladies told of in The Red Bedroom feel more like a figure for human frailty, the symptomatic behavior of men who don’t have something grounding them, a moral center. “Traveling High” tells of a lonely traveler who tries in vain to pick up a waitress, but can’t get any reaction. The prostitute-frequenting singer of “Life Between Heartbeats” croons about knowing that “something less than love can spare” him. Indeed, such would be a good working description of the subject matter of the album: something less than love.
It’s an easy sentiment to relate to, and one that isn’t often explored in pop songs. (If you’re literarily inclined, I’d suggest a writer like Sherwood Anderson, with his complex portraits of life in rural Ohio, as a comparison.) It supplies ample material for Mallman’s soulful and restrained compositions, and gives him a broad topic to explore over the course of an entire album.
The great irony of The Red Bedroom is that the shambling, woeful subject matter is in such contrast to the thoroughgoing confidence of the album. “I think a piece of artwork or a piece of music is a reflection of the person who created it. The earlier albums...I guess I was more, not really frustrated with the world but...less grounded.” Here’s to maturity.
Mark Mallman's plays the First Avenue Mainroom for his CD Release party on Saturday, June 22. 6 p.m. $8. 21+. 701 1st Ave. N., Mpls., 612-338-8388.
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