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Matmos - The Civil War - (Matador)
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Rant alert!
This is a concept album. No avoiding that. It starts with that title. It extends
to the musico-historical references (Matador are calling it the 2003 version
of the 1990 version of the 1968 version of the 1860 version of the 1590's
- which is outrageous bullshit, but magnificent bullshit). It throws in a
few seconds of background musket-fire volleys (or fireworks - same difference)
on tracks 4, 5, & 9. And there you have it: The Civil War.
Why? (it's a valid question)
With a title like that, you'd assume that Matmos were proposing some kind
of response to the not-insignificant world events that have intervened between
their last release - A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure - and this.
That they were drawing some analogy, maybe, between the events leading up
to the Gettysburg Address and the current unrealities. Interesting.
Dream on.
This 'civil war' would seem to refer to nothing more destabilising than the
routine domestic conflicts between two chaps who live and work together. "Hey
I cooked yesterday and anyway I'm sampling my rumbling tummy." The clue's
on the website: the winner of the freebie for proposing 'their favorite civil
war' is Matt of Seattle who says "I've always thought the Cola wars of
the 1980's were perhaps the most civil wars in the history of mankind."
(!)
Confronted with such sweet naîveté (where but America...?), it
seems almost churlish to complain that there's something faintly rank about
using the accoutrements of real conflict as sonic wallpaper. But there you
go. Guernica it ain't.
So what's the music like?
Pretty damn good, as a matter of fact. Well - once you get past the appalling
hurdy bloody gurdy and pipes and bassoon and faux-folktronica of the opening
two tracks. (Honestly, it makes you yearn for the good old days of those choice
Matmos samples of cracking nasal gristle and draining lipids and gurgling
extractors on A Chance to Cut.)
It's worth waiting, though, for the sublime emergence of a kind of cajun/zydeco
version of (I swear) 'Mama's little baby loves shortening bread' out of a
familiar blizzard of bleeps and whirring beats in Reconstruction. Which,
in turn, gives way to some perfectly home-baked (mmm, smell dem apples) acoustic
guitar, strumming away, all fret-squeaks and languid bottle-slides, at some
folk tune or other (Appalachian? Okie? who cares, so long as it's as lush
and homie and all-over yummy-yum-yum as this?). Which segués, in Yield
to Total Elation, into something equally familiar, equally Southern porch
pickin' session (it's on the tip of my mind), barely electro-embellished at
all by anything more recent than the Moog. Which in turn....
Yup, they're on a nostalgia roll, are Messrs Schmidt & Daniel of San Francisco,
playing - intentionally? who knows? - with the historically westward migration
of notions of freedom - taking note, en route, of the transmogrification of
the Stars and Stripes Forever into a Barnum and Bailey trademark, and rolling,
inevitably, up to that local black hole of unreality, the one that's nestling
in the foothills of Hollywood.
The Struggle Against Unreality Begins (Track 8) is a curiously iconographic
climax (I choose my words carelessly) - a clear homage to the primrose Hollywood
epic in general, and to its generic composer, Miklos Rozsa, in particular.
Using a literal pulse (a recording of M.C.Schmidt's carotid artery) as the
establishing beat, it builds, via a sequence of rambling jangling circling-but-not-not-quite-duelling
banjos and Tibetan singing bowls, into a mighty, booming, driven rhythm that's
calculated to urge every last joule of oil-slicked galley-slave's energy to
achieve that critical, murderous ramming-speed - oh! the inuendo!
This is a long way from the whimsical days of the Twirl - Photoshoot
remix on Kid 606's ps You Love Me - and several counselling sessions
on from the Aspergers Americana of their arid 1999 album The West.
Past work has tended to crystallise around the sheer bizarreness of their
sound sources (plastic surgery, rat cages, balloons and whoopie cushions,
latex clothing, walkie talkies, the amplified synapse of crayfish nerve tissue).
In this, their fifth studio album, the growth of a simple compositional appetite
has led them to draw on the musically more gifted skills of an eclectic and
very respectable group of collaborators: Steve Goodfriend and Jim Putnam of
Radar Bros, Jay Lesser, Tim Barnes, Keenan Lawler, David Grubbs, Blevin Blectum,
and the hugely accomplished Mark Lightcap, among others. Musically, it's by
far their most rounded and satisfying album to date.
(And if I didn't mention Gudmundsdottir once, that's just because I didn't
want to confuse the issue.)
