Band: Mack Maloney

CD Title: “Sky Club”

Label: VoicePrint Records

Label Website:

Release Date: 2010

How many times have you ever found yourself reading a book and in the process heard the soundtrack or at least some incidental music being played in the theatre of your mind? I know I have. So it’s perhaps not unexpected or unusual that authors would look to that idea as another creative outlook. Such is the case with award winning action writer Mack Maloney and his first music CD entitled Sky Club. The sci-fi concept was begging for a soundtrack and so Maloney (keyboards) enlisted the help of Rich Kennedy (guitars, effects) and Mark Poulin (guitars, bass, percussion, vocals) to bring the project to fruition. Before getting into the details of the story, this “concept” CD is made up of twelve tracks, ten of which are pertinent cover tracks along with two originals. The covers come from artists such as The Who, Jars of Clay, Mike and the Mechanics and many others. And they all service a purpose.

Sky Club is a sci-fi story set in the future where an astronaut crash lands on a planet and slowly lives out his final days with nothing other than his iPod and the music stored on it to keep him company. Years after his death an alien race with no appreciation for music finds his body and the iPod. They’re able to restore the device and hear music for the first time. The 12 songs contained on Sky Club become the history of the astronaut for these aliens and in a way he is immortalized by them. The songs includes tracks such as “Don’t Let Go the Coat”, “Flood”, “Worlds Apart”, “Silent Running” and so forth. Each track is given an appropriately spacey intro and extro which has a way of putting the song into the context of the story. As far as the covering of the songs, it’s done with a high degree of accuracy sticking pretty close to the originals in terms of structure, although I must admit to being fooled a few times by the creative arrangements.

This is an interesting project. The idea that Mack Maloney can use another medium, that of music to help tell his story is clever. And while the musical approach is quite different it’s an idea that he shares with Kevin J. Anderson of Roswell Six fame. My guess is that Sky Club will have pretty broad appeal. While the songs themselves will appeal to fans of the artists whose music is included, prog fans will be intrigued with the overall concept and still others who are fans of the sci-fi genre may want to give this a listen. There is an old radio maxim that says “the music grabs them but the information holds them.” And that certainly seems to be the case with this creative project.