I watch my breath in the orange streetlight haze of another city winter, and wondered when this all stopped feeling like fun. It’s the smell of congealing pizza and the feel of somebody’s drunken knees kneading into the base of my spine on the last bus home. It’s clutching at the scarf at my neck or shoving my hands in pockets that are starting to spring a hole I can’t help picking at. It’s the lights reflected in the river. We’re heading north, but man, this feels like south.
There’s a muddy, claustrophobic sound to Dear Lover, the new album from this singer-songwriter I fell hard for last year. It could be the beats, or the muddy guitars. There is just too much noise for this to be the product of one man and yet, as everything layers together to create a thick, intensely personal wall of sound which throbs like the inner membrane of the brain it’s hard to imagine that it has been shared. Even the harmonies sound like bedroom echoes.
“Some Streets Lead Nowhere” is the album’s standout track. I’d heard it before, discovered by accident before I even knew there was another album on the way. Sort of like the way I discovered Matthew Ryan himself. I love you, was all that she said… Ryan’s usual throaty croak provides the perfect, honest delivery as the strings swell.
And “We Are Snowmen” sounds like the world’s lamest title but I had to put its glowing din of human wreckage on repeat: the ghostly piano, the sense of desperate loneliness. This album is full of personal moments like this, like a fragile heart trapped under museum glass that begs to be touched again.
sometimes I close my eyes and hum those songs we loved
your dress was blue and you were as bright as Christmas
A couple of listens later, I’m no more sure what I’m trying to cling onto here but I know I like it. While there are some missteps on the album – “Spark” ft. DJ Preach is a little bizarre and not what I’d expect from a Matthew Ryan record, for example – this is a gorgeous, warm record that only reveals new depths with each listen. Because the minute you create this stuff because you want to, rather than because you have to, is the minute it all goes wrong.
DOWNLOAD:Matthew Ryan – Some Streets Lead Nowhere
BUY: Dear Lover at Matthew Ryan Online
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