Kali Malone – All Life Long

Organ Dirges, Sacrificial Code are her best albums plus some of her early cassettes are interesting. Everything else is forgettable. I mean Does Spring Hide its Joy is beyond boring

Like many other greats who do something that really moves you like "the sacrificial code" they get acclaim and then they lose the magic. It's almost to be expected at this point. I want to like this so much but it leaves me cold, living torch was the same, just blah.

Gatefold booklet is full of smudged ink. Each page has just a smear of black ink. Every one of the small poems and all the text are illegible due to the poor print. Can’t even make out what it says, the text is so faded and smudged. The only text that is legible is the credit listings on the back page. It’s only the photos that are up to standard.

Very, very disappointing, it just screams negligence and carelessness.

Could be my player, but is anyone else experiencing some distortion with the louder choral sections?

What I admire most about Kali Malone is her unrelenting seriousness. She aspires to reach for the sublime, which is the most difficult artistic pursuit of them all. She doesn‘t appear to care if she‘s mocked for her intense solemnity, because she is so laser-focused on a higher mission. When listening to her music, I think of Terrence Malick. They both share the same spiritual ambition to reach for transcendence. They are both humourless to the extreme, because humour would threaten the purity of their vision. If you can tune into their higher frequency, it is a truly spellbinding experience. Yet it is not easy. The spectre of pretentiousness is always around the corner. They demand a lot of patience while they march with heavy steps toward their artistic destination. But the reward is profound if you listen with an open mind, and it will be fascinating to see what she will accomplish in the future.

It is sad to say, but the more she got media exposure, the less interesting her work turns to be. Is it axiomatic ? But let's be honnest : these organ works are adding absolutely nothing to what she already brilliantly did in Sacrificial Codes, and the choral and instrumental works sounds remarquably boring and pompuous. I'll go back to Living Torch and Sacrificial Code with pleasure all the time. Now I'm having a hard time not to hear a massive pretentious failure here.