GUEST POST: Mal Blum's Transness Is Complex on 'The Villain'
On their first album in six years, the LA-based musician dives into the contradictions and messiness of existing as a trans person during this particularly rough backlash.
This review of Mal Blum’s ‘Villain’ is written by singer-songwriter, mixing engineer, composer, and music journalist Hannah Jocelyn! Learn more about her at the end of this review, and please — consider a paid subscription to Lavender Sound so that we can continue to pay brilliant writers for their thinking, time, and labor. Enjoy!
WHY THEY’RE HERE: Mal Blum’s 2019 record Pity Boy depicted coming to terms with their non-binary identity; this record, The Villain — their first since starting testosterone — explores what it’s like to be a trans person.
WHAT’S THE VIBE: tongue-in-cheek, subversive, self-effacing
START HERE BUT ALSO KEEP READING: “I’m So Bored,” “Gemini v. Cancer,” “Killer”
If there's something I wish I knew pre-transition, it's that you are going to be somebody's villain. Whatever your intentions, you will inevitably hurt people whether you intend to or not. And if you can't make things right, you have to learn to live with being the villain instead of digging yourself deeper, and you have to learn from your actions. This is not complicated; it’s just life. And yet, it's always more painful as a trans person since your very presence and identity are conditional.
For about 15 years, Mal Blum has found their niche in that messiness; look at their 2013 song “Valentine’s Day,” on which Blum and their partner try to stop cheating on each other. There's “raw” and “confessional,” then there's ending the bridge of that song with, "On some level, I like to create emotional distractions in my life to prevent myself from dealing with my real issues.” Twelve years later, on their fifth LP The Villain (out tomorrow, Friday July 11, and produced by Jessica Bourdeaux of the now-defunct punk band Summer Cannibals), they’re addressing those issues head-on while diving into the contradictions and messiness of existing as a trans person during this particularly rough backlash.
If you didn’t know Mal Blum got started making bedroom folk-punk, it would be easy to think of The Villain as a debut album from a rising pop-punk star. And in some ways, it is: This is Mal Blum's first full-length album since starting testosterone, and both the world and their voice have changed a lot since 2019’s Pity Boy. Over the course of their career, their music has become more streamlined, less meandering. Villain is a culmination: Its sound is absurdly polished, almost to the point of ‘90s alt-rock. It’s only a step removed from Third Eye Blind’s hits, and not just because “Cool Guy” recalls the chorus of “Never Let You Go.” In keeping with this polish, Blum trades their loquacious musings for something more mature, even as the subject matter is messier.
This maturity helps when they return to themes of toxic relationships. The tense “Gemini vs. Cancer” amusingly explores a mutually toxic relationship where the astrological signs are the least of the couple’s problems: “You carved my name into your bed frame / I burned yours under my rib cage.” This isn’t love, and everyone involved knows it. On “I’m So Bored,” Blum is so unenthused by a relationship that they don’t even notice or care when their partner leaves them. Tellingly, Blum sings the line “we’re doing this again” on both songs. They’re trapped in cycles of people turning on each other, cheating on each other, and not even being surprised when it falls apart.
There’s something thrilling about seeing someone commit so thoroughly to the bit of slacker-power-pop, embracing and slyly subverting a famously cis male genre. On album thesis statement “Killer,” they outright embrace unfeeling and toxic masculinity, basking in the sadism of killing ants and even their past self (“I think that’s pretty reductive,” they say in the song, “but I’m tired, so whatever you want”). I’ve seen transmasc people struggle with “hating men and becoming one anyway,” and this looks at that framing and shrugs, “So what?” Blum sends up the way trans people are simultaneously envied and feared on “Cool Guy,” bragging that, “everywhere I go I am somebody.” It’s not long before the facade begins to drop and they admit, “I’ve got nobody.” You can only be the villain for so long before it stops being a societal problem and starts being something you actually need to work on.
As the album comes to a close with “Too Soon” and “The Villain,” Blum stops trying to put on a persona or wink at the messiness. On “Too Soon,” which has the most muted, atmospheric production on the record or maybe any of Blum’s records — think Ethan Gruska and Tony Berg’s production on Phoebe Bridgers’ “Garden Song” — they reflect on a past relationship before quickly remembering the other person’s transgressions; it’s personal in a way the album mostly deliberately avoids. The title track is a story of Blum leaving a relationship, embarking on a new life, then ultimately admitting they’re still as tired and bored (there’s that word again!) as they always were. It’s a display of humility, which often showed up on Blum’s other records but is defiant here: “It feels so small being bitter / Now I’m ashamed by all the blame I’ve levied onto you.”
It took a while for me to warm up to The Villain because the production is so clean; it’s smarter than it first appears. “Nobody’s perfect” often has an asterisk next to it: “unless you’re an oppressed minority, in which case you have to be perfect or else.” That’s no reason to be toxic, but it’s no reason to feel shame either. You don’t need me to tell you that trans people are so villainized that UPenn is now offering apologies to people who lost to transgender swimmer Lia Thomas. You don’t need me to tell you what respected institutions like the New York Times have done to trans rights. Underneath the posturing, The Villain is a plea to see trans people as neither brave heroes nor predatory villains, but as complex individuals whose flaws do not, and should not, define them.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Hannah Jocelyn (she/they) is a New York-based writer, audio engineer and musician. Her bylines have appeared at Pitchfork, Stereogum, Them and many other places. Hannah also runs the queer-focused Transient Peak newsletter and releases music under the stage name The Answers in Between.