{"id":89,"date":"2008-10-04T00:16:46","date_gmt":"2008-10-04T07:16:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.downthelinezine.com\/archives\/?p=89"},"modified":"2011-03-16T10:12:40","modified_gmt":"2011-03-16T16:12:40","slug":"lower-case-ep-by-bill-mallonee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/downthelinezine.com\/reviews\/lower-case-ep-by-bill-mallonee\/","title":{"rendered":"Lower Case EP by Bill Mallonee"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"lower-case-ep\"BILL MALLONEE
LOWER CASE MINI EP<\/strong>
2008 Independent
Purchase: billmallonee.net<\/a>
Review by: Steve Ruff<\/p>\n

This mini E.P. is just what it says, mini\u2026 but this disc packs a serious punch and is one of the best things to come down the music slide this year. The three songs that grace this disc, available as a download only from billmallonee.net, are \u201cSober Up\u201d, \u201cString Of Pearls\u201d and \u201cSad Parade\u201d. This is Bill at his best, backed by a full band and his wife Muriah on piano and vocals.<\/p>\n

All three of these songs were previously only available on BillTunes, his monthly subscription service that comes out at a furious pace of 5 new songs every month. The cool thing is that with the subscription you get these songs in a more \u2018demo\u2019 form, and with Lower Case you get to hear them upon completion with the band.\u00a0 Everything is here in abundance, the multi-layering guitars and string arrangements are top notch. Muriah\u2019s vocals are beautiful and lend a very heartfelt, almost haunting, quality that blend well with the songs that are what I love most about Bill\u2019s music\u2026 introspective, intuitive and sometimes heart-breaking.<\/p>\n

Bill\u2019s ability to write lyrics that rival Dylan are here as well. Check out these lyrics to \u201cSad Parade\u201d which was his tip of the hat to Robyn Hitchcock:<\/p>\n

\u201cYeah, and I am sitting in this room, On every hill there is a fool
And my conscience, it\u2019s the lurking shadow, Of a hangman that I haven\u2019t met
A lovely uniformed cadet, Those killing fields never lying fallow\u201d<\/p>\n

Bill\u2019s music is one of the most overlooked works of art for the past twenty years. Always a \u2018critic\u2019s darling\u2019 band with Vigilantes of Love, and now solo for the last several years, commercial success has been elusive and unkind. Bill writes, in my opinion, the best Americana music that is out there. This is the real deal, so get online and check out billmallonee.net<\/a> where you can follow the link in the upper right corner to the digital downloads page where Lower Case can be found at a reasonable price.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BILL MALLONEE LOWER CASE MINI EP 2008 Independent Purchase: billmallonee.net Review by: Steve Ruff This mini E.P. is just what it says, mini\u2026 but this disc packs a serious punch and is one of the best things to come down … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":717,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[24,20],"tags":[34,98],"class_list":["post-89","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music-review","category-october-2008","tag-bill-mallonee","tag-independent"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/downthelinezine.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/downthelinezine.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/downthelinezine.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/downthelinezine.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/downthelinezine.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/downthelinezine.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":949,"href":"https:\/\/downthelinezine.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89\/revisions\/949"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/downthelinezine.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/717"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/downthelinezine.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/downthelinezine.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/downthelinezine.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}