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MATT MALONE
& THE HOLY SPIRITS
release new single
‘THE STRANGER’

+ Announce Melbourne
Album Launch Show

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PRESS

‘★★★★, Cracked, haunted, fantastic.’
The Sydney Morning Herald

“(Matt Malone & The Holy Spirits) are stripped and bare in the outlaw country tradition, but with the menace and slow stabbing guitar of a Rowland S. Howard Special.”
Rolling Stone

“Matt Malone deals in dark, heavy and sombre music… his voice a gothic, stentorian and preacher-like baritone. There are obvious touchstones like Nick Cave, Jeffrey Lee Pierce and Johnny Cash who he absorbs into his death blues soundtrack of rattling strings, ghostly sounds and strummed wasteland ballads.”
The Music

“Whatever juju, alchemy or disturbed darkness that made Jim Morrison put on a pair of leather trousers & shock the world out of its apathy… Matt has got it!”
Kim Salmon (The Scientists, Beasts Of Bourbon, The Surrealists)

“The song is a musing on destiny and the inescapability of certain circumstances in life, an Australian gothic take on faith and identity, and while the narrator seems resigned to his fate the refrain is repeated with a certain determination that suggests he may break free.”
Sunburnt Country Music on the single For The Term Of My Natural Life’

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Matt Malone is a singer/songwriter born in the goldfields region of country Victoria. He has formed his musical vision out of the blues, country, folk and gospel traditions of the American, British and Australian past.

Malone’s commanding baritone and masterfully crafted songs have been compared to the archetypal Johnny Cash, African-American gospel preachers such as Blind Willie Johnson, poetic folk troubadours including Leonard Cohen and tenebrous lyrical princes Nick Cave and Mark Lanegan.

The new album For The Term Of My Natural Life is without a doubt Malone’s most personal, autobiographical and accomplished work to date.

Receiving strong community radio support, the title-track and first single was described in glowing terms by Backseat Mafia as “Malone’s sonorous and resonant voice recounts tales of woe and hardship in a barbed-wire baritone that bleeds with pain and regret… while wallowing in some swampy Antipodean bayou with a filtered light and liver damage.”

Now comes ‘The Stranger’, a song that hangs in the air with a sense of grace and doomed love. Ash Jones’ beautiful, melancholic violin and Henry Hugo’s ghostly guitar in particular create a shimmering Mazzy Star-like atmosphere for Malone to weave a Cohen-esque tale through the gothic country-noir landscape.

“Lyrically it’s the closest to Leonard Cohen on the album – a songwriter who has inspired me immensely over the years.”

“‘The Stranger’ was the first song I wrote that made it onto the album,” reveals Malone. “It’s always been fascinating to me how you can be so close, so intimate, with someone that you love, then you break-up and it’s as if you never knew each other.”

The song recounts the estrangement that has crept into a relationship between two longterm lovers – initially unbeknownst to the narrator. The song begins with the beloved as the stranger, yet as the story progresses the dynamic reverses, and the narrator himself becomes the embodiment of strangerhood.

The single ‘The Stranger’ is out now via Bandcamp, streaming services and AMRAP for our community radio friends across Australia.

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These are songs of experience – warnings and acknowledgements of mistakes made, with a desire to build a Heaven in Hell’s despair.

A pandemic-induced relocation from Melbourne back to Ballarat provided a psycho-geographical location for Malone to focus on the completion of the writing of the album’s songs and find a central thread for their subject matter. “I also took the opportunity to reassemble myself after years of drug / alcohol abuse and exploration through Thelema / occult practice by going back to my religious roots and developing a deeper communion with nature through long walks and prayerful meditation,” Malone reveals.

Across the new album’s seven tracks, the overarching themes include overcoming great adversity, forgiveness, love, justice, grace, sin and redemption.‘The Stranger’ looks at the collapse of emotional reciprocity, while ‘Crazy Jane’ explores madness and wisdom.

On the lilting sway of ‘The Best Day Of My Life’ Malone documents the end of an abusive relationship with an unvarnished and poetic honesty. “In a way it’s my unintentional take on one of those cruel / honest Bob Dylan break-up songs ‘Positively 4th Street’ or ‘Idiot Wind’, bedded with the intimacy of Merle Haggard’s ‘My Favorite Memory’. I always admired the humanity of those songs”, Malone confesses.

Two centrepieces of the album are ‘The Unrepentant Thief’ in which Malone conjures up the spirit he believed possessed him during his days as a heroin dependent and alcoholic, while on the near eight minute album closer ‘Judgement Day’ the protagonist experiences and sees some of the worst that humankind has to offer and comes to the conclusion that we all need to be cleansed by divine justice – another insightful clue as to Malone’s spiritual journey in recent years.

It’s also important to note the players that brought their skill and nuances to the sound of the album. “I wanted to introduce different musical voices into the record to set it apart from my previous work,” Malone explains, “I recruited Ash Jones (violin), Henry Hugo (guitar), Adam Casey (bass), Katie Walsh (backing vocals) and Simon Edwards (drums) who brought their extensive experience and unique perspectives to their respective roles. Ash brought his classical / Gypsy expressiveness, Henry his Neil Young infused post-punk, Adam his Charlie Haden-laden openness, Katie her Hildegard von Bingen ethereality and Simon his Jim White inspired sensitivity. I think these elements make this record a really singular listening experience.”

Musically there’s a measured quality to the tone, pacing and delivery of the songs on the album. The sombre and spacious canvas of stately gothic country, complete with violins, guitars and funereal drums, gives Malone’s lyrics a wide landscape on which to lay out his autobiographical and mythological tales for the listener.

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FOR THE TERM OF MY NATURAL LIFE

1. For The Term Of My Natural Life*
2. The Best Day Of My Life
3. The Stranger*
4. The Unrepentant Thief
5. Crazy Jane
6. Love, You’ve Given To Me
7. Judgement Day

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Follow MATT MALONE &
THE HOLY SPIRITS
Facebook – Bandcamp – Instagram

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About MATT MALONE

Over the last fifteen years, Malone has released the albums S .I. X, Hymn Unto Her and an EP H., to peer and critical acclaim. He has played extensively around the country and shared the stage with many established artists including Kim Salmon (Beasts Of Bourbon, Scientists, The Surrealists), Hugo Race (Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds) and Wendy Rule.

For many years, Malone has been an icon and contributive partner in the Ballarat music and arts community, being funded by the City Of Ballarat for sound commissions and working as a booker for many local live music venues. For over ten years now, he has hosted the community radio show Hell Or High Water on VoiceFM in Ballarat.

Malone has heavily contributed to countless charity organizations through voluntary work, fundraiser gigs, donations or percentages of his album sales, particularly to Tabor House (drug/alcohol rehabilitation centre, Ballarat), North Richmond Needle Exchange, Bridge-Darebin Community House and the St. Vincent De Paul Society.

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AMNPLIFY – DB