Customer Reviews

Black City

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4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Sordid, Obscure, Luscious... Elegantly Corroded, Broken... at times DISCO, at other times Krautrock, Minimalist is a truly spectacular album, Matthew Dear shows the great musical maturity as a writer or storyteller, AMAZING!

An album full of contrasts, textures, environments (all in the night, but different), Matthew Dear is often in different places, does not like being enclosed, for that cause actual handing makes such diverse recordings, but with the caveat that everything has a thread, in this case the night (and sex too) is the common thread of this story, full of lust and obscene sounds delights us with this incredible material.

This album is filled with layers of sounds to explore, some softer than others and at times very hard, but very well done.

Accented vocalizations and deep (as night), come to mind, dark deserted streets, nightclubs forgotten in basements full of wickedness and lust. Full of great creativity and conceptually, by the end Matthew is going places being brighter but only to warn the equilibrium or balance between darkness and light, sometimes I think it is very sad but sometimes I feel the optimism want to experience, really a very beautiful work.

I am fascinated by exploring each sound of this album, each layer, each vocalization, every word, with divine metaphors.

An album to enjoy to the fullest, in which case the concept (Deep Night- Darkness) do not cause fear, simply spectacular.

Matthew Dear's "Black City" is a richly textured collection of earthy, dark music, with some catchy hooks mixed in here and there. It is at times lively enough to be considered dance music, but most of it is downtempo, with dissonant instrumental hooks and creative loops that come together for great effect. Matthew Dear also does a great job of mixing real instruments with programming in a way that gives electronic music a certain feeling of physicality. The vocals are distorted, but keep in mind this music is not about lead vocal hooks, it's something you can listen to almost like an instrumental album, and vocals go along with the rest of the dark electronic sound.

Personal favorite: Slowdance, which is a beautiful, haunting track that someone should put in a movie.

Other standout tracks: Honey, I Can't Feel, Little People (Black City), Slowdance, You Put A Spell On Me, Monkey.

I enjoy electronica music and Matthew Dear is one of my favorite composers. I have almost his entire catalog of CDs including his Audion and False discs plus his Body Language remixes. As an electronic composer, this guy is simply one of the best. However, not all is well. I consider him to be a marginal singer and I don't particularly care for his voice. In his first CD, "Leave Luck to Heaven" he sang only a few songs and the rest of the music consisted of "instrumentals." Since that time, the vocals have become more and more dominant and on this disc every track is burdened with a vocal. I can't understand his singing. A printed set of lyrics is included, but they are crudely hand printed in gray ink on a black background and are all but unreadable. It's hard to be very critical, because Dear is such a master composer and the background music is excellent. Wouldn't it be unrealistic to have him be a master singer too? Well a lot of electronic composers have guest vocalists an arrangement that works out for the better. In any case, I think the background music of this CD is excellent, but it's badly flawed by the vocals.

Gary Peterson