We are overjoyed at being able to bring you exclusively the new single ‘For The Term Of My Natural Life’ from Matt Malone and the Holy Sprits. Hailing from country Victoria, the song encapsulates a wild and bleak weary world that came from the cruel oppression and banditry of a Victorian era and the remote rural landscapes.
Crisp acoustic guitars jangle and crystalline electric guitars shimmer in the ether as Malone’s sonorous and resonant voice recounts tales of woe and hardship in a barbed-wire baritone that bleeds with pain and regret. His voice seems to emanate from the bottom of a whiskey glass and provides a soundtrack to an Hieronymus Bosch portraiture of despair. In this delivery, Malone and his band exudes the characteristic hallmarks of Johnny Cash, Leonard Cohen or Nick Cave while wallowing in some swampy antipodean bayou with a filtered light and liver damage.
Malone says of the track:
…the song title and concept was inspired by the classic Australian novel by Marcus Clarke that tells the story of a young man unjustly convicted of a crime that he didn’t commit and his subsequent incarceration in the Tasmanian penal colonies where his experience of injustice is brutally meted out.
Malone read the book during the first Covid-19 lockdown and deeply related to the character and his story of unjust judgment and imprisonment:
When you received a life sentence in the 19th century, the judge would declare – ‘you will be imprisoned for the term of your natural life.’ I think that relates not only to a prison sentence but to life overall – we are here for the term of our ‘natural’ lives. As the perennial saying goes – life is suffering, the hope in it for me, is it also implies a life beyond this world, a supernatural or eternal life.
The darkness pours out in every note into something visceral and haunting:
‘The Term Of My Natural Life’ is out tomorrow (Friday, 9 June 2023) and available through the link above and via all the usual download and streaming sites.
The song is the title track to Matt Malone & The Holy Spirit’s new album due out very soon.
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