Avalon

Album Review

Avalon is the debut full-length album by JD Malone & the Experts, but it doesn't sound like a first-time effort. Malone, a Vermont-born, Philadelphia-based singer/songwriter with a nasal tenor that lies somewhere between John Mellencamp and Steve Earle, is an accomplished stylist, and the Experts, his four-piece backup band (multi-instrumentalist Tom Hampton, electric guitarist Avery Coffee, bassist Jim Miades, and drummer Tommy Geddes), provide cohesive folk-rock arrangements with the occasional hint of country (particularly when Hampton breaks out his pedal steel), also suggesting the likes of Mellencamp and Earle. It would be easy to figure that Avalon came half-a-dozen records into Malone's career, and, as it turns out, it actually does when you include this journeyman's album with his old band Steamroller Picnic; his two duo albums with Gerry McWilliams; a solo EP, and an earlier EP with the Experts. No wonder he sounds so assured. But if the sound harks back to the heartland rock of the late '70s and ‘80s, it does so more in terms of form than substance. All of the artists with which he might be compared musically (and you can throw in Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen) write substantive, often socially conscious lyrics. Malone writes love songs, often with a sensibility that suggests a man trying to hold his relationship together across distances, as if, for example, he were an itinerant musician. He occasionally waxes poetic, but his inclusion of a cover of "Fortunate Son," a socially conscious song by another major influence, Creedence Clearwater Revival, points up the difference. Maybe that means that this is not great music, but it certainly is good, and it is likely to be enjoyed by music fans who have been starved for this kind of mainstream rock since its heyday. [The digital release of Avalon contains its main 13 tracks. The physical release adds as a bonus track a "radio edit" of one of the songs, plus a 37-minute DVD of an album rehearsal session, and four audio tracks of songs from the DVD, among them a cover of Petty's "I Should Have Known It."]