Orb Mellon

August 13, 2007:

ORB MELLON-Love Above
V-Hold Records- 1401

Orb Mellon, the John Hammond-ish alter ego of ex-Dirt Merchant Mike Malone, can play. The blues-crazy indie-rocker isn't being
ironic or coy with these Delta boogies, East Coast stomps, and blasts of crude, Dylan-style harmonica - he's deadly serious. His
songs on this overlong album are mostly vamps, but when they click (the Son House-ish scorcher What I'm Going To Do With You,
the Fuller/McTell inspired I Think Of You) Mellon seems to channel his Depression-era heroes. His voice, on the other hand, sounds
thin and could use some of the grit and gravy heard in his guitar playing.
-LIVING BLUES MAGAZINE (August 2007)

July 25, 2007:

Visual artist Peer Hansen's exhibit "Man Made Lake" which includes ambient soundscapes produced specifically for the installation
by Orb Mellon opens at the Outrageous Look Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NYC.

July 13, 2007:,

ORB MELLON-Love Above
V-Hold Records

Bukka bustin’ barrelhouse blues with the punch of punk rock, a full throttle blast of traditional blues set to maximum acoustic volume
to blow your juke house down.
-ROOTSREVIEW.BLOGSPOT.COM (July 13, 2007)

July 6, 2007:

Packed weekend of music

If you weren't able to catch Orb Mellon's show Friday at the City Ale House, you can always catch him as he makes his way
through Massachusetts.
Mellon (aka Danbury native and current Monroe resident Mike Malone) performs tonight in Cambridge and Thursday in Somerville.
Mellon achieved indie success in the early- and mid-'90s in the Boston-based Dirt Merchants.
These days you can find him playing acoustic blues, influenced by musicians Son House, Bukka White and others.
The recently released Orb Mellon debut "Love Above" is available online through cdbaby.com and iTunes.com, as well as at Disc &
Dat, 107 Greenwood Ave., in Bethel.
Orb Mellon performs tonight at 10 at the Corner, part of the Middle East Club, 472 Massachusetts Ave. in Cambridge. Also on the
bill is NYC-based bluesman Brownbird Rudy Relic. Cover is $3. For more information, visit www.mideastclub.com.
Mellon performs Thursday, July 12, at 9 a.m. at Abbey Lounge, 3 Beacon St. in Somerville, as guest opener for the Weisstronauts.
Cover is $8. For more information, visit www.abbeylounge.com. (Ryan Foust)
-DANBURY NEWS TIMES (July 6, 2007)

June 29, 2007:

Mike Malone at Ale House

Guitarist Mike Malone, also known as Orb Mellon, performs tonight at City Ale House on Main Street in Danbury. To hear Mike
Malone lay a slide to the strings of his metal-bodied National guitar, you'd never guess that for most of his musical life distortion was
de rigueur and going unplugged was not even a possibility. "I played in a rock band for 15 years. I thought electric about
everything," said the Danbury native, who now lives in Monroe, barely taking the time to mention that the rock band in question was
Dirt Merchants, an indie band that made a name for itself on the early-'90s Boston alterna-scene. The band released a handful of
singles (on vinyl) on their own V- Hold label before recording a full-length album, "Scarified," for indie label Zero Hour in 1994.
That album was later rereleased by Epic Records, for whom the band recorded their major-label debut "The Speed At Which You
Speak." That album was never released, though they did manage to release one more EP on V-Hold before dissolving the band in
1997.

So what was Malone doing for the past decade? "I was learning how to play the guitar differently. It was a total technique change
for me," he said. "I had been electric for 20 years, never even picking up acoustic guitars." Malone said the extended stay in the
woodshed allowed him to gain some perspective and, no longer relying on his band for his income, gave him room to explore what
he wanted to do with his music. As a result, he "evolved back into" the music he listened to growing up, blues musicians like Bukka
White and Son House, who he called "the most intense influences for me." "For me, somehow, it's rock. It's like Zeppelin in terms of
intensity. The intensity of listening to Son House by himself just hamming a National -- it's just a beautiful thing," he said.

Malone's solo release, "Love Above," was released earlier this year under his stage name, Orb Mellon. Written over the course of
nine or 10 months and recorded in just a day, the album channels pre-electric American roots music without sounding like a tribute
or, worse yet, outright mimicry. "I don't consider myself a revivalist or a blues perfectionist, it's just sort of the style I write in," he
said. "I'm not trying to sound like an old bluesman. I'm just an old musician who is really drawn into that style of performing and that
style of arrangement so I like to think that my work doesn't come off as an attempt to mimic it that much. I just like to think that I'm
doing new music."

Mike Malone, aka Orb Mellon, performs tonight, 10 p.m., at the Arcadia Music Night at City Ale House, 253 Main St. in Danbury.
For more information on Malone, visit www.myspace.com/orbmellon. "Love Above" is available online through cdbaby.com and
iTunes.com as well as at Disc & Dat, 107 Greenwood Ave., in Bethel. Copies will be available at tonight's show. (Ryan Foust)
-DANBURY NEWS TIMES (June 29, 2007)

May 8, 2007 :

Orb Mellon - Love Above
V-Hold 1401

It's unlikely that many blues fans came into contact with Boston indie rockers the Dirt Merchants, but even for those who did, this solo
debut from the band's guitarist, Mike Malone, isn't exactly a logical musical progression. Instead of the Merchants' grungy
roots-punk, Malone (now known by the odd moniker Orb Mellon) taps the Delta and Piedmont sounds of acoustic country bluesmen
such as Bukka White, Son House, Charley Patton, and Furry Lewis. The disc's 13 original compositions are cut from the same cloth as
the classic songs that defined these and other prewar guitarists.

"Aberdeen" and "Looking for Trouble" dig deep into the Delta mud for intense, emotionally moving performances that make Malone
sound like he was born 80 years ago and raised in a shotgun shack. Malone is an agile slide guitarist, as exemplified by his nimble
National steel work on "Long Way Home" and "What I'm Going To Do With You." Since all but one of the tracks were recorded in a
single day, the production is minimal and there are virtually no overdubs, making the session even more spontaneous.

Malone's voice isn't as gritty or as soulful as this music demands, but he makes the most of it and sings as if he's got a hellhound at
least close to his trail. There aren't many musicians working entirely in this style, and even fewer who used to be in punk bands, so
Malone deserves props for releasing a strikingly honest album without commercial concerns. Love Above won't put him in the league
with the greats, but it's an impressive start to a second career.
(Hal Horowitz)
-BLUES REVUE MAGAZINE (June/July 2007)

April 17,2007 :
"Love Above" is #50 in the Real Blues Magazine listing of the Top 100 Blues CDs of the last 12 months.

March 30,2007 :

Orb Mellon - Love Above
V-Hold Records 1401

Orb Mellon is the nom de disque of Connecticut-based Mike Malone, one time guitarist with East Coast indie band, the Dirt
Merchants, who now performs his own solo material, which might well be described as "21st century downhome blues". I first
encountered him last year on the excellent Weenie Campbell website and following a link was able to listen to him on MySpace. I
liked what I heard and was attracted to a musician who quotes his influences as Bukka White, Fred McDowell, Son House AND The
Clash. This had to be a man with some attitude and indeed this, his first release, has plenty of attitude, not to mention some really
great music.

All 13 tracks are originals and all but one were recorded in a single day in order to preserve the spontaneity of the performances.
Apart from one track on an all mahogany Martin, Orb plays a single-cone National or an old ladder-braced Gibson Cromwell
flat-top, thus achieving a great downhome blues sound. He sings in an unaffected, pleasing voice and adds rack harmonica to some
songs. The only other instruments are foot stomp, plus a bit of percussion on a few cuts. He is also joined by his old Dirt Merchants
colleague, Maria Christopher, who provides backing vocals on a couple of songs as well.

Every track is a winner, so it would be futile to single any out. Whilst you get the occasional hint of the ghost of Bukka or Patton,
there are no re-runs of old blues songs. These are new songs with all the raw energy of the old masters. Already a contender for my
album of the year, this one will get repeated plays. If you like your blues presented in an honest, straight-ahead fashion, check out
Orb Mellon's website and you will not be disappointed. Rating: 9 (Michael Prince)
-BLUES IN BRITAIN (April 2007)

March 22 2007:

Blues, No Chaser: Dirt Merchants former frontman (and Monroe resident) returns with an album that's strickly da
blues

We have our prickly biases here at the Fairfield County Weekly , and one that’s pretty universally shared among the staff is that Eric
Clapton sucks. Not in the sense that the man can’t play the guitar, since that’s obviously untrue, but in the sense that his excruciating
generic-ness is exactly what attracts him to the safe and secure ramparts of Baby Boomertown, where Slowhand has been named
milquetoast mayor for life.

His popularity, like B.B. King’s, is really more a case of the Last Men Standing than anything having to do with their talent; both
players are designated Ambassadors of the Blues by default, and neither’s up to the task.

Fightin’ words, but my tastes lie squarely with the really menacing, the really dirty, the really bluesy blues—Wolf, Muddy, Lightin’
Hopkins, Leadbelly, Son House, R.L. Burnside, Robert Nighthawk, Junior Kimbrough. Give me a blues record that’s dirty, depraved,
desperate, that’s all honey-drip innuendo, crippled-spirit wails, and back-door, red-rooster-crowing manliness—or give me
Bloarzeyd.

So let’s talk about a truly bluesy blues album, the just-released debut from Orb Mellon, aka Mike Malone, who some may recall was
frontman for Boston indie-rock stalwarts the Dirt Merchants back in the 1990s. Malone now lives in Monroe and has just released his
first solo album, Love Above , featuring 13 tracks of primeval Delta-dipping blues tracks, most of them featuring Malone on steel or
wood acoustic guitar and harmonica (and voice) and not much else. As a “project,” the album succeeds on terms that would
probably put the terror into Clapton’s withered, studio-possessed soul: A dozen of the tunes were recorded in one day , and, goes
the press report, most of those were “executed in one take.” That, friends, is definitional “old school.”

The result? A white-boy-blues record bristling with immanence and urban tuff—Love Above is all rollicking, finger-snapping
steel-guitar slash-and-burn, slide runs and spot-on fingerpicked shimmy-do, and while certainly there are “nods” to Malone’s
forbears, as Brian Mosher wrote in the March issue of The Noise , Malone’s not “mimicking the masters but…paying tribute to the
style they created by making it his own.”

To my ears, Malone’s voice has a bit of Dylan ’65 to it, even some Stevie Ray; it’s resonant and reedy, a voice the late French literary
critic and semiotician Roland Barthes would describe as having some true, hard-won grain to it. In its purest form, which is how
Malone approaches it both stylistically and spiritually, the Delta blues offers salvation that is universal both in its implication and its
reach. We grapple with our God through the blues, just as we grapple with our lovers and our outrage at a sick and venal world.
The blues, in turn, frees us from ourselves (if we let it). All the great bluesmen knew that the real cathartic action lay somewhere
betwixt the sacred and the profane—Malone knows it too.

In a piece exploring the implications of Barthes’ landmark 1977 essay, “The Grain of the Voice,” critic Robin Markowitz observed,
“The grain belongs to anyone who can experience its physical presence. The grain, like a dream that is too real, returns the
repressed in its volcanic and inescapable physicality.”

That sense, of an “inescapable physicality” appears to lie at the core of Malone’s approach to the blues—Love Above’s physicality
is lean-muscle tight and without affect or pretense. Within the confines of the form, “your love,” as Malone sings on “Rolling River,”
frees itself and is “like a rolling river down to the sea.”

Put simply, the blues is love—love, the blues. Stripped down to a quivering, naked core—that’s where you’ll find both in their purest
and most palatable form. (Tom Gogola)(PS: Eric Clapton still sucks.)
-FAIRFIELD COUNTY WEEKLY (March 22, 2007)

March 1, 2007:

ORB MELLON
V-Hold Records
Love Above
13-song CD

Orb Mellon is the acoustic blues alter ego of Mike Malone from the late lamented Dirt Merchants. Love Above is a collection of
original material in the style of delta bluesmen like Son House and Bukka White, and Mellon displays a real affinity for this kind of
material. He doesn’t try to write about life on the plantation or about runnin’ from the devil; he writes about the real life experiences
of a 21st century man living in a major urban metropolis. And that’s the key to his being able to pull this off: he sounds sincere, not
like he’s mimicking the masters but rather that he’s paying tribute to the style they created by making it his own. Very good stuff.
(Brian Mosher)
-THE (Boston) NOISE (March 2007)

January 27, 07:

The demo version of "Long Way Home" is included on the Wrench In The Works Compilation.

January 24, 2007:

"Love Above" is released.

July 13, 2006:

It's In That Blues Busting Blast, It's In The Stomping Swagger

Tell the music to be your muse, and it just might listen. Tell it to be your cherished chug and syncopated hell-step and it may just give
you an explosion that raps at the walls and sets the dry-wall into to a frenzy of panic.

Sometimes music is meant to cat claw at the girders and leave your paltry partitions with low self-esteem. When acoustic music
reverberates with more electricity than a California power plant, your boogie-feet might just have its work cut out for them, in fact
there may be hell to pay.

When I think of Orb Mellon, such images come to mind, because the shake, startle and power of his resonator churns along at the
dirge neck speed of a hobo hopping train; this is a blues blast for sure. I met the man yesterday at his show at Pete’s Candy Store in
the ‘burg and while he presents himself as the perfect unassuming gentleman, his guitar tells a different story; it enlightens you with
its primordial pump and raw busting energy.

This is music that tests the seams and thumbs at the fibrous thatch that keeps us at edge and seconds away from that boogie boom.
It is steady rolling and steady trolling; this is blues music without the plastic sheen or overproduced fluff; this is blues in all its
primeval glory. (Brownbird Rudy Relic)
-TANGLED IN THE ROOTS (July 13, 2006)