Jesse Malin
On Your Sleeve
Rating: 2.0
Label: One Little Indian
The covers album. Perhaps it's a good idea if you're an interpretive singer: a Nina Simone or Dusty Springfield or Luther Vandross. Less so if you're a singer-songwriter, accustomed to crafting material for your own voice. Take Bowie's Pin-Ups or Lennon's Rock and Roll or Costello's Almost Blue. Interesting curios all, but when was the last time you reached for them over Ziggy Stardust or Plastic Ono Band or Armed Forces? For the artist, a covers album is a sincere, if masturbatory, tribute to idols and influences. But to the listener, a covers album is an inessential, often dubious placeholder, worth a listen or two and then filed away to gather dust once fresh original material hits shelves.
Jesse Malin's On Your Sleeve is no exception to the rule. After a weak studio album (2007's Glitter in the Gutter) and a weaker live album (June's Mercury Retrograde), Malin now tackles 14 songs near and dear to his pseudo-boho heart. Even in his punkier days fronting D Generation, Malin's music frequently referenced the pop landscape of yesteryear and in the fashion of Dylan and the gazillion semi-poetic tunesmiths who followed in his, he cribs a line here and a melody there, weaving his own tapestry out of already worn fabric. So a covers album seems logical, perhaps even a natural progression, especially after his somber piano-ballad rendition of "Bastards of Young," a highlight on Glitter, sadly omitted here.
Few of the choices will surprise anyone familiar with Malin's solo oeuvre: Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, Tim Hardin, The Hold Steady. You almost wish Malin would take a gamble with a less obvious cut, say, a Wu-Tang track or a disco number or, hell, even the "alternative" version of a massive pop hit (see Ted Leo or Butch Walker doing "Since U Been Gone" or Fountains of Wayne doing "...Baby One More Time"). Malin's choices are uniformly great, to be sure, but also uniformly predictable. Heavy on the NYC punk and heavier on the rootsy singer-songwriter troubadours, this is exactly the covers album you'd expect Jesse Malin to make, and it suffers for that.
Vocally, Malin's groggy 3 am warble is certainly distinctive, apropos for his loquacious tales of city-dwelling fuck-ups, but hardly versatile. His voice, along with his general disposition, brings out the mournful qualities in these songs, whether they're present ("Hungry Heart," "You Can Make Him Like You") or not ("Walk on the Wildside," "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard"). Each cut is a bit too reverent, as though Malin is cowering at the heft of these timeless rockers. He seldom deviates from the source material, and when he switches up a song, it can be excruciating. For example, he renders the Rolling Stones' "Sway" a Suicide-style dirge, one that does no favors for either Jagger-Richards or Vega-Rev. He conspires with Bree Sharp to drain the Irish out of "Fairytale of New York," leaving a rousing karaoke performance with a tacky, even schmaltzy ending. There are a couple keepers: the campfire singalong of the Hold Steady's "You Can Make Him Like You" highlights the sympathy beneath Craig Finn's contempt, and on the telephone drama "Operator," Malin seems sufficiently despondent where Jim Croce always seemed disconnectedly affable.
Essentially, On Your Sleeve re-imagines 14 classics and almost-classics as Jesse Malin songs. Of course, the Jesse Malin version never outstrips the original. All of these songs are still readily available, some an inescapable part of American culture, so the necessity for Jesse Malin's inferior take is questionable. This whole project, sporadically entertaining as it may be, is dubious and indulgent. On Your Sleeve is, to paraphrase a band not included in this repertoire, a simple prop to occupy our time.
by Charles A. Hohman