Jesse Malin - On Your Sleeve reviews
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| Allmusic |
 Covers albums are always -- always -- tricky propositions. They've become de rigueur for artists who've been knocking around a while, either as a stopgap, for some press attention, or as a substitute for having new ideas. Usually an artist will make a crucial aesthetic mistake in cutting one of these. While it might lie with either being too liberal with the material, it's far more often either being too conservative with it or, worse, being too ambitious by not being up to the challenge of interpreting a great song. The only really valid criterion for making a covers record these days is this: can you bring something really new to the material you've chosen to record? Songwriter Jesse Malin answers the question with a resounding "yes" on his own covers set, On Your Sleeve. Coming off a very successful album in 2007 with Glitter in the Gutter, cutting a set of other people's songs is a risky move, but this was well worth the effort. The formula, if there is such a thing, is simple: Malin cut songs as a rock fan first. These tracks all hold a special place in Malin's rock & roll pantheon, and he sought to bring to them a fan's heart and a songwriter's skill. He employs his road band in the studio, augmented with friends who don't need sticker recognition on the front cover. In other words, it's the music that counts. The range is breathtaking. The set opens with a shimmering, minor-key country-ish version of the Bad Brains' classic "Leaving Babylon," with ringing hollow-body guitars -- it's a complete melodic reinvention of the song in Malin's own image as a singer and writer. Then there's a skiffle reading of Paul Simon's "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard" and a version of the Rolling Stones' "Sway" that evokes latter-day Roxy Music, Suicide, and Jagger and Richards all at the same time. And this is only the first three cuts....full text |
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| Popmatters |
Rock stars love mixtapes too. They’re just like us! Except, rather than futzing around with iTunes for an hour to create the perfect self-expression through someone else’s songs, musicians book studio time, commit a dozen or so cover tunes to tape and share them with the world. Or sometimes, they do so just to fulfill the terms of a recording contract. Either way.
If you’ve been keeping track this year, it’s been a solid year for cover albums (and no, I’m not counting The Bluegrass Tribute to the String Quartet Tribute to Fall Out Boy). It’s been a year that shows the wide variety of ways that artists tackle the cover album. There are reinterpreters (Cat Power’s Jukebox); crate-digging-as-public-service-types (the Hellacopters’ swan song Head Off and the Wildhearts’ Stop Us If You’ve Heard This One Before, Volume 1) and the here’s-a-bunch-of-well-known-tunes-I-dig guys. The last is a slot solidly, if unexceptionally, filled by Jesse Malin’s On Your Sleeve....full text |
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| Drownedinsound |
Let me say one thing at the outset: if not for the fact that my words would be disregarded as knee-jerk and intentionally reactionary, I would have no qualms giving On Your Sleeve, the latest album by Brooklyn-based 'folk-rock troubadour' type Jesse Malin, a nice round zero.
It is without question one of the most infuriatingly bland albums released this year; a covers album reworking songs from such luminaries as The Rolling Stones, The Kills and Harry Nilsson ('Everybody's Talking', click for the original) into identikit pieces even more soulless and middle-of-the-road than the originals....full text |
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