Mixtape Review: Rudy Malone — "Eagledale Nights"
Disclosure, again, because this site is small: Rudy writes reviews here and reviews my records. This is me reviewing his. He gave mine a 3. I am aware of how this looks.
Eagledale Nights is forty minutes with no features. Not a hook, not a verse, nobody. He was offered several and turned all of them down, and when asked he said "it's not a group project, it's a place," which is either the most pretentious thing anybody said to this site this year or exactly correct. It is exactly correct.
The Central Trick
He writes about Eagledale the way people write about somewhere they left. The nostalgia, the specificity, the slight elegiac tilt — all of it is the grammar of departure. He never left. He still lives there. He has no plans to go.
It is a record about missing a place you are currently standing in, which should not work and does.
Where It Stalls
The middle third repeats itself. "Four Blocks" and "The Porch" are doing nearly identical work and one of them should have gone. Forty minutes is about six too many, which is a criticism I am aware he will find funny given what he wrote about my track lengths.
Four out of five. Best thing he has made.
