Mick Malone

TOP 10 OF 2012: INDIVIDUAL TRACKS

Sat, 29 Dec 2012 17:21:21 -0500

1. PASSION PIT: CONSTANT CONVERSATIONS

2. HOP ALONG: TIBETAN POP STARS

3. THE AMERICAN SCENE: THE VIEW FROM HERE

4. THE AMERICAN SCENE: SHAPE SHIFTER

5. PURITY RING: BELISPEAK

6. JAPANDROIDS: THE HOUSE THAT HEAVEN BUILT

7. LOS CAMPESINOS: TIPTOE THROUGH THE TRUE BITS

8.CLOUD NOTHINGS: WASTED DAYS

9. PRAWN: SPRING RIVER

10. HOW TO DRESS WELL: COLD NIGHTS

I made an effort to try and only do one song from each artist, but I can’t stress enough how fucking great The American Scene record is and it was tough to keep a few more tracks from them off this list.

TOP 10 OF 2012: RECORDS

Mon, 24 Dec 2012 20:50:00 -0500

1. THE AMERICAN SCENE: SAFE FOR NOW

2. PURITY RING: SHRINES

3. JAPANDROIDS: CELEBRATION ROCK

4. HOP ALONG: GET DISOWNED

5. CLOUD NOTHINGS: ATTACK ON MEMORY

6. PASSION PIT: GOSSAMER

7. THE TALLEST MAN ON EARTH: THERE’S NO LEAVING NOW

8. KENDRICK LAMAR: GOOD KID, MAAD CITY

9. POS: WE DON’T EVEN LIVE HERE

10. NOW NOW : THREADS

I had considered doing write ups for these records, but I remembered I have no idea how to describe/talk about music anymore. Also realized I didn’t listen to too much new stuff this year. Getting old. Getting lazy.

worncolors: I know we’re taking forever to release a new EP,...

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 18:05:09 -0400

worncolors:

I know we’re taking forever to release a new EP, but it’s not because we get off on being withholding or we’re trying to tease it for some bullshit hype. We’re just not entirely happy with how things have been sounding, so we’re going to keep taking our time with it with no real timetable for a release. To try and make up for the wait, we’re releasing this live set from last night for free which has a bunch of new stuff as well as some old. A huge thanks to everybody at WRCT’s Advanced Calculus who were super cool to us and for doing a phenomenal job with this. If you like it, please share it.

Worn Colors : Live on WRCT

My band just released a live studio set we recorded for WRCT’s Advanced Calculus radio show for free download/streaming. http://www.worncolors.bandcamp.com

Mick Malone : The Postman Doesn’t Come At Night I...

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 15:23:20 -0400

Mick Malone : The Postman Doesn’t Come At Night

I want to drink the blood from the throat of something ancient and impossibly strange, feel its fur between my teeth, its lungs breathing through my lungs. I want moonlight in my eyes so I’m painting crosses beneath my lies, terrified that you’ll break your spine bending over backwards to make me feel okay, and it’s not okay and will never be okay. So I sat in silence and ground my teeth to powder, watched a dubious zebra and poisoned cobra fight in the waving tree branches till the sky turned dark, till silhouettes wash into backdrop and my mouth fills with smoke. I cross my fingers till they break and weave together, my hands are boats taking on water. I’m drinking out of bathroom faucets and breaking mirrors in subway stations. I’m solving puzzles only so I know how to dismantle things, keeping keys beneath my fingernails to doors beneath rivers and across countries. I’m singing you songs from broken staircases in the corner of our former homes. I had notes written, dizzy and manic in scratched out eyes of painted saints in forest churches in languages I’ve forgotten while tangled up in bed sheets and hanging from the ceiling fans but the postman doesn’t come at night and I just can’t bare the light and all you are is light.

An update of sorts

Sat, 04 Aug 2012 21:39:21 -0400

I haven’t updated this in a while, so here’s what’s up.

My band Worn Colors has been writing / recording a new EP that will hopefully be out early September. It’s dark and heavy and a fucking bummer. But we have good times. We’ve been playing a bunch of shows around Pittsburgh and hoping to get out to more cities soon.

I have begun work on my next solo / spoken word / experimental record. Nothing recorded yet, but words have been written and ideas formulated. It’ll be out this year, but no idea when.

I also have a couple other projects in the works, but I don’t want to delve into them until I really know what’s going on with them.

I want to wear the white elephant mask, sneak up onto your mattress and between the sheets but the foxes teeth have grown into enormous trees and I can’t find you beneath the leaves.

Sat, 26 May 2012 19:46:42 -0400

The Gardens Roam [6/30]

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 18:11:25 -0400

The gardens aren’t planted; they crawl out from the oceans in the shape of lions. Their enormous sundew manes drip ink and seed; bees follow the enormous paw print through tar and wet asphalt. The gardens roam.

Five People Sleeping. [5/30]

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 18:56:59 -0400

1. A family of foxes covered themselves in white paint; they hide against your bedroom walls until the daylight fades and plant blackberry seeds beneath your pillow while you sleep.

2. The rat king has fourteen mouths. He sets off bottle rockets all night until your neighbors call the cops.

3. In a dream, you gave me an orange under the condition that I only eat the peel. You walked away, I didn’t eat anything.

4. It’s so strange how every thing reminds me of what we’ll never be. If it hurts, just say the word and to the roots I’ll return. I’ll misread the signs and pull away; there are some things I could never say.

5. Somebody rakes all the pine needles out from beneath the trees. I’d like to know them, I’d like to know where they go.

Untitled [4/30]

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 20:01:51 -0400

Stay asleep with me;
I’m studying vampire geography through the dresser drawer.
We share the most uncanny dreams.

Shadow Puppets [3/30]

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 20:05:24 -0400

I want you to lay on your back in the dry grass, open your eyes wide and with my hands we’ll cast shadow puppets against the sky. I’ll be the monster and you can be the bird. My claws will disappear into your wings, get a little close, we are one shadow, come a little closer. Close your eyes.

Oiseau [2/30]

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 01:41:42 -0400

There’s a ghost that haunts the forest, he never sleeps but eats lies through his crustacean eyes. He lives in an orphaned church with a vine steeple and leads a procession of patchwork people. A wolf sleeps in the basement of the church, he howls through the confession booths. A priest is overdosed in the pews. A girl sleeps with her hair over her face. Her stockings are ripped at her toes. She dreams of French singers whose names she cannot pronounce. She calls them all Oiseau. The pianos all moved out to Budapest, she wants to kiss a girl from Iceland. I just want to sleep in the forest, feeding myself to the ghost.

So Fox Party [1/30]

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 13:36:05 -0400

My fingers were made for rattraps, extension chords are just belts that need plugged in and the ninja turtle neighbors won’t offer you blow. But you’ll wake up to the stuttering grandfather clock sidewalk soldier soon; So Fox Party, you’re Megaman X dashing through parking lot lanterns, you’re a wild beast made of broken circus tents, you’re a dizzy gospel singer hurling eggs at racist paintings, you’re a battle tank of fire hiding between the pages of a magazine, a VHS tape in a jean jacket, a synth line so fat that it makes my teeth buzz. So Fox Party, kiss with too much tongue. So Fox Party, be the joke that falls flat. So Fox Party, sleep outdoors in the rain. So fox Party, So Fox Party.

Peacock Fingernails

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 19:31:33 -0400

A grizzly bear swallowed a rain cloud; he grew extra paws with fragmented claws and burrowed beneath my bed. Now there are thunderstorms in my closet, now there are cadavers in my head. Amelia doesn’t like the way I speak about the sea; she wakes from daydreams about Jacques Cousteau with oceans in her jeans. When the closet floods, the bear drowns. My mattress grows into the forest that Amelia paints in the concrete suburbs to lure in and murder the birds. She’s got feathers beneath her fingernails; she lulls me to sleep with her daytime television teeth.

   We bury our widowed organs in the backyard; she plays piano till there’s cactus thorns in my heart and my veins settle into their morning nap. We exchange our deflated lungs in rusted birdcages, she whispers against my lips her dreams of wolf packs roaming frozen village cemeteries and men in monster suits buried beneath the trees in her backyard. She tells me about the creature in her parents’ tool shed that begged her to kill her cat until she leaned on its neck and heard it crack. Her eyes shut to thoughts of splintered antlers that produce poison fruit and the night her uncle removed his face and showed her his real hands. To Amelia, my ocean is her swamp. It clots her blood stagnant with algae, and now there are angry alligators snapping in her belly.

Listen//Download

Beneath A Tree Of Wild Beasts

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 02:40:19 -0400

I was caught sleeping beneath a tree of wild beasts. In dreams, I bury pieces of myself into paperback books, constructing agitation and inducing sickness for unsteady fever dream parties. And there, we were bank robbers with wounded throats scamming quiz shows, kissing between Osage diamonds.

I wake to my teeth tearing mutiny from bark, stretching fiberglass webs to stitch the constellations to our lips, building another town for every clumsy sentence fragment I collect from these ghosts that haunt our box spring.

I can’t accept all these dead letters dropped off broken and bleeding on my front porch by these phantom cats, I can’t keep painting you portraits of decaying trees, their stripped bark arms can’t tuck your hair back behind your ear, but I can. And I’ve still got the cuts on my knuckles from the zipper of your jeans, spending night after night falling in love with your mask that melts plastic on my lips. So I’m not sleeping in your back yard, not tonight. I’m wide-awake listening to the secrets you’ve tried to abandon as they call the fire department on your most peaceful dreams. I’m collecting your orphaned piano keys and burying them under my tongue to grow staccato note divisions, our push and pull.

I’m hoarding all of the sweetest things you say in my bedroom until I’m trapped, and I’ll have to chew holes into my wrist to escape into a bleeding orchard that we’ve grown from violin strings and broken dishes. I’ll have to wait for the sun to rise, for the dull tree line to wilt into silhouettes and I’ll say

“Just look at all those beasts girl, sitting up in that tree. With all that matted fur and silk feathers. Do you hear that song? It’s Yellowstone lake music, the Bristol hum, four knocks with tears in your eyes. And I can’t count all those claws and teeth on just two mangled hands.

Listen//Download.

Amelia

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 01:36:46 -0400

That boy was dilapidation. He wasn’t born; he just collected himself on a spoiled beach from mangled shipwrecks and rusted submarines and arbitrarily pieced himself together. He fashioned organs out of woodworm dug out of the soft rotting wood with whalebone fingernails. He stitched hair out of rope saturated with seawater. He didn’t know his name, but he knew if he dug deep enough in the sand he could find a different sun that fit into the palm of his hands but didn’t burn, only softly buzzed like a hive of bees.

In the seaside town, he met Amelia and her swollen cheeks. She couldn’t stop chewing on the drowsy jellyfish tentacles that splayed out from her evicted wisdom teeth. She had a bumper sticker than said “Girls can be Megaman too, So Fox Party” but she didn’t own a car.

He loses his hands in her hair, touches his nose to hers. He says, “My sails are ripped and torn and the wind hasn’t blown for days. I’m so tired of wandering. I can’t wander anymore.”

He could taste blood in every other kiss. They spent their mornings picking each other out of themselves. He, removing fragments of stitching from his teeth and tongue and Her, the water logged splinters from her thighs and fingertips.

“Your body is an open cinema and I’m a director of lazy shorts tripping over broken armrests,” he says, his tongue fishing stitching from inside his lip.

He listens to the soft steps of her flats on the cold concrete, catches crosses in the dull buzzing of streetlights, and holds smoke in his lungs until his vision wobbles. “Yesterday morning I had to solve the most intricate fever dream puzzle,” he says. “and when I sweat that illness away, you sang me something soft and sweet and lulled me back to sleep.”

She falls back on the mattress, stretching her skinny legs across floral print, her hair spreads and blooms and reaches, wrapping live ivy vines around the wooden pillars of the headboard. Her nature overtakes the bed, and he returns himself to her.

Listen//Download.

Download my book: Awful Sounds.

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 15:01:01 -0400

Download my book: Awful Sounds.:

About two years ago, I published my second collection of short stories and poetry. I am out of copies, and I personally don’t think it’s worth paying for. Some people have been asking for it, so I’m just releasing it for free. It sucks reading on a computer, so I apologize for that. But if you were interested, here you go.

I just released a new experimental/spoken word EP for free. If...

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 01:20:21 -0400

I just released a new experimental/spoken word EP for free. If you like it, please pass it around.

Mick Malone: Beneath A Tree Of Wild Beasts

1. Amelia

2. The Forest & The Sea

3. So Strange, You Feel Like Early Morning

4. Beneath A Tree Of Wild Beasts

5. Peacock Fingernails

I just released a new song from my new experimental/spoken word...

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 01:14:12 -0500

I just released a new song from my new experimental/spoken word record Beneath A Tree Of Wild Beasts. I’ve been having a ridiculous amount of fun making it, and I’m excited to see if people get it. You can stream/download the track for free below. And PLEASE share it if you like it. Thanks

Mick Malone : Peacock Fingernails

A grizzly bear swallowed a rain cloud; he grew extra paws with...

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 00:33:31 -0500

A grizzly bear swallowed a rain cloud; he grew extra paws with fragmented claws and burrowed beneath my bed. Now there are thunderstorms in my closet, now there are cadavers in my head. Amelia doesn’t like the way I speak about the sea; she wakes from daydreams about Jacques Cousteau with oceans in her jeans. When the closet floods, the bear drowns. My mattress grows into the forest that Amelia paints in the concrete suburbs to lure in and murder the birds. She’s got feathers beneath her fingernails; she lulls me to sleep with her daytime television teeth.   

We bury our widowed organs in the backyard; she plays piano till there’s cactus thorns in my heart and my veins settle into their morning nap. We exchange our deflated lungs in rusted birdcages, she whispers against my lips her dreams of wolf packs roaming frozen village cemeteries and men in monster suits buried beneath the trees in her backyard. She tells me about the creature in her parents’ tool shed that begged her to kill her cat until she leaned on its neck and heard it crack. Her eyes shut to thoughts of splintered antlers that produce poison fruit and the night her uncle removed his face and showed her his real hands. To Amelia, my ocean is her swamp. It clots her blood stagnant with algae, and now there are angry alligators snapping in her belly

The Forest & The Sea

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 02:03:00 -0500

We used to have a beach, but not anymore. Years ago, we spent a week in July smoking stale cigarettes and drinking peppermint schnapps as we watched the trees slowly rise out of the ocean weaves. They grumbled their seasick anxieties, shaking the salt water from their spruce beards and picking out the jellyfish speared from the needles on their arms. Their roots squirmed through the sand, inching up like cat tail caterpillars desperate to kiss our windowpanes.

They were enormous, those trees. Their highest branches dragged gashes through the sky, parting seas of cotton for stardust sediment. And it rained for two days; I drank pomegranate tea from your bangs, your little brother almost drowned in his sandcastle moat…typical. And when their intersecting branches, rigid fingers and heavy overcoats of leaves strangled out our graying sky, you said, “You’ve gotten pretty pale, you know.”

Saplings would roam throughout the night in our suburban streets, sliding their mangled branches into our bedroom windows to steal our dreams. They played dice on our front porch, huffing paint from paper bags and getting our screen doors sticky with sap. And when you woke me up and asked if I wanted to do something fun, you covered my eyes and bit my tongue.

It wasn’t long before the mayor personally took it upon himself to restore the beach, to open our coasts back to the sky and sea. He filled his chest with saw dust, opened his right nostril to a mound of snuff on his right thumb, scratched his dog behind her ears and went into backyard cellar where he swallowed twenty-three honeybees and took his axe to the trees. But his chopping only angered the beasts and his tobacco spit stained their leaves so with a hollow groan and an inaudible roar, the trees opened up and chewed him with poison ivy teeth.

Now we’re not so sure there is a sea at all, we’ve wondered through the trunks of the wooden beasts for miles, but I can’t even hear the gulls anymore.