Myles Bullen - "Time To Kill" Album Review

                                                      MYLES BULLEN - TIME TO KILL

Note: Originally published as promotional content for Myles Bullen's album on www.StrangeFamousRecords.com 

Myles Bullen's new album "Time to Kill" is an opus of bruised hopefulness.  Winking with a black eye, singing love songs with a bloody lip, a hug with scarred arms, a tearful acknowledgement of the smile shape of an upturned funeral umbrella. 

The album rests comfortably and familiarly in their prolific underground catalog.  This isn’t to say it’s a comfortable album.  Myles, as a bohemian spelunker of the human condition, brings us listeners along to vulnerable places in both darkness and light.  

“Time To Kill” improves upon old themes, musical and vocal approaches and production quality.  One stanza will be rife with cartoonish whimsy that will cause a laugh or shake of the head, and the next section will knock you back with brutal bluntness.

I was struck by the album’s balance of great production value while managing to maintain Myles’ signature haphazard, DIY aesthetic.  Aside from the literal performance feeling of the one live track, the album often feels as though you’re in the room or on the phone having the song performed FOR YOU. 

To my ear, the frequent gang vocals, their frequently changing delivery and the lo-fi effects and various samples from both television, movies and personal correspondence gives the album an occasional jammy, unrefined feel.  This conveys a purposefully inviting intimacy they have successfully and beautifully represented throughout their musical work, handmade merch and grassroots performances. 

Myles shows up (though never showing off) as the album's protagonist, a dog-loving road dog poet, rapper, singer, instrumentalist, and all around whimsically grieving humble vocalist. And oh are the vocals a highlight on the album.  Myles’ voice is an instrument here, vacillating effectively between singing, rapping, yelling, chanting, talking, screaming and even scatting.  

The full potential of vocal expression is truly on display throughout Time To Kill, sometimes multiple vocal approaches overlap in a venn diagram of originality.  You’re also hearing Myles rap harder, technically and better than ever here.  Soon after abruptly reminding you any given vocal approach is an expressive tool for dynamic purposes, not an egotistical dogma of genre, and trailing of into any of the other expressions, talking sweetly, trailing a line off into a decrescendo yell, a mournful scream or even a giggle.  Myles is keeping us on our toes, as life often does.  None of these moments feel forced.  

 Time To Kill is an authentic presentation of a person deeply concerned with conveying their experiential world, no matter how embarrassing in its personal pain or quirky whimsy.  Myles is breaking as many boundaries in content as they are in presentation.  New personal altitudes of talent are being reached here just as more walls are disintegrating at the artistic hands of honesty.    

  The ethos of Time to Kill seems to be to live with a defiant warmth in the acknowledged blizzard of the world's cold lessons and losses.  Another mission statement both in content and presentation could be “vulnerability in the face of hardship is the ultimate bravery.”  This is sincerely delivered poetry, with a tone often somewhere between cheering and pleading for something to cheer for. 

While mourning many eulogized losses inwardly and outwardly, Myles surely can’t mean there is “plenty of time to kill” but that the ephemeral quality of life urgently implies its preciousness.  Seen through that motivating lens, what will you do when you find you have time to kill? Well then, it’s time to kill it, and on this album, Myles and their many gifted cohorts certainly have.  

I encourage you to listen to this album if you’re a human and definitely listen to this album if you’re yearning to become one.

-AllOne (Bruce Pandolfo)