Matthew Dear
translation from italian to english by Cais das Palavras
Dear Matthew,
What a frickin’ enigma you turned out to be! That’s how I’d kick off my imaginary epistle to an artist I’ve been alternately attracted to, repulsed by, and intrigued by again and again all summer long, often even bored, but never indifferent. The recent release of Beams (not new today in November) had convinced me to further investigate this highly-lauded author unknown to me. The new tracks first began circulating on Soundcloud back in June; now it’s pouring cats and dogs, my bones are aching, and if I want to go out tonight I’ve got to dig up a jacket. Nature’s wheel has turned full circle and I still haven’t made up my mind about this strange relationship I’m in with Matthew Dear. I must confess that my first samplings on the squeaky speakers of a laptop Made in Foxconn left me emphatically unimpressed: the cuts just sounded like harmless loops without soul, bland and bare, all oppressively the same. I gave up out of sheer boredom, no need to put on the headphones for a better listen. Later, I thought I ought to give another shot to an artist the music press had been running out of superlatives for, so I went digging into his past in search of some forgotten gem testifying to future genius, passing over Asa Breed, his debut LP for Ghostly International (yuck, what a cover!) entirely, but succumbing to temptation for an interesting collection of micro-house tracks produced by our man for Spectral Sound between 2003 and 2007 entitled Beginning of the End: The Spectral Sound Singles. Ah, methinks, this is where we’re going to get to know each other better; and plus, an extra bit of beat in summer won’t do any harm. Doing 70 down Teramo-Beach highway appeared to offer the right test conditions for the new material. Whoa, big mistake! A scarce one minute into Irreparably Dented sufficed to transform the interior of my Japanese MPV into the inferno on wheels you might encounter in an Eli Roth Film. I was so scared I had to pull over for a sandwich. And a quick whiff of my Little
Trees air freshener. Anything. Anything that might wipe out the memory of the deformed creatures I’d dreamed I was running over along that brief stretch on the Highway to Hell. That’s one sick disk, I declared. Deciding to go on enjoying my summer, it went straight to the bottom of the pile. I caught a low-cost flight and left Italy behind during my amply-deserved two weeks low-cost vacations in Berlin, where I was looking around for new tunes to bring back home rummaging through the piles in a back alley music store, when my bleary-eyed gaze fell on the coal black, cigarette smoke cover of Black City. Berlin truly offers something for everyone. That’s how Matthew D. wangled his way into Italy in the liquid form of music inside my Made in China but Engineered in California Smartphone. And he won’t be leaving soon. Evidently I’d failed to learn my lesson. Call me just another bull-headed Abbruzzesi, a masochist, even. But one thing’s sure: it might have taken us a little time, but now we’re a pair. Whether I like it on not. Master or slave? Take your pick.
GHOSTS’N’GOBLINS
So much ink has been spilled linking the artist at the top of my tortured summer’s totem pole to the David Bowie of the ‘80s, and so much more could be written about the shameless flattery my dear Dear has paid both in studio and on stage to Eno-era Talking Heads and the mature Bryan Ferry. We’ve decided to content ourselves with just the following definition of his muse: Matthew likes ghosts. He blatantly says so himself in More Surgery: “I’m in love with ghosts”. Add that to former membership in Spectral Sound. Isn’t that enough? Need we also recall the label he helped establish, Ghostly International, for additional proof? Totally unnecessary: just listen to his music: whispers and murmurings, cavernous reverberations, indefinable samplings, amoebic themes, delays with codas that last forever, and his gloomy, dark, abysmal voice. The problem, however, is ghosts, who have a liking for Matthew himself, it seems. Apparently flattered by his declarations, far from torturing him with howls and rusty chains, they look him up to pass the time, invite him to come play in their morgue. Arm in arm, off they go down to the pub together like brothers in arms. It’s like making a Tim Burton film into an audio track, the same pop sensitivity and playful streak, the freak’s carefree air and disarming nonchalance in handling such otherwise slimy and repugnant material. The only difference is that Burton never grew up (and to tell the truth you can only go on flogging a dead horse so long) and maybe Matthew D. never will. Born in ‘79, D. seems obsessed with the idea of achieving a certain standard of decorum and elegance, curiously attracted by the pallid charm of sobriety emanated by his avant-pop icons usually reserved to more mature songwriters with platinum disks on their walls and upcoming projects with successors to Pavarotti. “Understatement” is surely a keyword in deciphering
his music: it never goes over the top or curries favor. Even on the tracks in Black City you could dance to, Matthew
never really comes out bragging that after his family moved from Texas to Michigan he first made a name for himself on Detroit’s techno scene. On the whole, you hardly ever find anything even remotely exciting in his music, which is fairly peculiar for a producer with such a dancefloor pedigree. But all’s fair in a world where Kid A sells more than Ok Computer, and even pissing off your fan base can become a winning move. Not everyone can swing it, of course.
SIM SALA BEAMS
Although the transition from Black City to Beams may, in fact, require a little effort from his early followers, for me – first entranced by the Dear sound just less than a month ago, it was easy enough to accept this gesture of creative freedom he makes with his latest LP, and I must say that after considerable play time, I’m a believer. Especially in the tracks in which his change of course is clearest. Let me explain: whereas Black City appears to be a highly coherent gothic work – practically a musical paean dedicated to a displaced metropolis on steroids that recalls the eponymous film by Fritz Lang with allusions to Frank Miller – Beams, composed of a thousand fragments, is more of a garage sale, where you can find bits and pieces of our old Dear in black & white, sounding exactly like the artist at least you have come to know (Headcage, Ahead of Myself), with a slight shift in emphasis closer to his evident points of reference – David Sylvian is the first who comes to mind (how not to think of Reznor’s The Fragile listening to Matthew’s Shake Me?). An aspect of his personality never seen before appears peeping out from behind dark clouds: a bent for melody and chorus, bashfully joyous, vaguely exotic, developed through unusual instruments (for him), like the marimba, with rhythms that wink at hula dancing. I can’t be sure, but when I listen to tracks that have by now won me over completely, such as Her Fantasy, Fighting is Futile, Do the Right Thing and Temptation, I can only think that Matthew D. just wanted to take a vacation from himself. The album features more “danceable” episodes and recalls that certain inviting groove that is anything but frantic a la Mock & Toof (Up & Out, Earthforms) – even if there, the influence of David Byrne is so obvious that plagiarism could almost be invoked, but we’ll be nice and stick to the words tribute and influence. On the whole, the entire disk is more vibrant and “hippier” than the others, with wider appeal in its variety, but above all richer in range of mood and musical experience. It soundly shatters the monolithic, monochrome image of Matthew Dear and breaks down
into the myriad beams of the title. Everything gets mixed up unpredictably, as if to reproduce that strange thing printed on the cover that’s either a self-portrait or some abstract artist’s sorely used palette – you decide. It’s also up to you whether this mix blends together convincingly or whether Beams is mere hodgepodge. But if the names of the international stars mentioned above quicken your pulse, the latest effort from Matthew Dear will not disappoint. Older fans should listen with patience, giving an artist entering a phase of transition his due. I can say one thing, however: Matthew Dear might detonate the real explosion with his next album, and only if certain trends that have emerged in the past year are confirmed; at the moment, the revolution that many have feared (and that I’ll go on record as supporting) isn’t even halfway over yet.
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