'First Listen' ruminates on records we're excited about - penned before their release date and whilst still drunk with the confusing hot flush of first impressions. Previously: The National. M.I.A. Arcade Fire.

Matthew Dear
Black City

Release date: August 13th



Matthew Dear’s Black City comes together in a way that has only been hinted at in his past work. The artwork, the title and the music are of a piece—an expression of an idea carried out with aplomb. Only fools don’t judge an album by its cover; ‘it is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.’ In this case, it’s dark and smeary and menacing—Dear’s features are in there, stark and neon-lit, but smudged and downcast. That captures so much of the tone of the LP’s tracks: Black City is marked by spacious productions, a strong rhythmic throb at their centre and tens of woozy, chopped, screwed, smeared, delirious, fevered details layered in over the top.

Dear, then, is still operating at the experimental edge of pop. Nothing here is going to race onto the pop charts—much to our own detriment. But you can easily listen to the whole album without focussing on the brilliant details scattered throughout. It’s not flashy stuff. Black City remains dedicated to a peculiar kind of art-pop songcraft throughout, never revealing too much technique. Dear is more proficient at working his machines than many today, but he has no interest in coming across like some narcissistic dickwad tweaking synths in a music store.

The first serve of Black City oozes onto your plate with the suitably viscous opener ‘Honey’. Woody bass octaves and a submerged rhythm carry the tune. With this track, you’re welcomed to Dear’s House of Mirrors, as proportions stretch, time stutters and everything floats away to a shifting perspective. It’s here that we get the album’s first seasick feeling; the first taste of dripping clocks, rubbery notes. Unsettling melodies rise in the background. There’s something delivering a breathy exhale down your neck. ‘Honey’ establishes the album’s haunted feeling. A shuffling rhythm, no drums. Digital distortion and glitches at the end that dice and desiccate the vocal harmonies we’ve heard throughout. It peters out into nothing.

But ‘I Can’t Feel’ quickly comes to a point. It’s a heavier track, as big, tremolo synth notes fan out to left and right, disorienting and disrupting the simple rhythm underneath. Here again the bass takes on its rubbery feel, purposefully left sounding like a live bass guitar, fingers on frets, gradations in picking. The morose vocal drone of ‘Honey’ becomes a stabbing falsetto in the first part here; if he was a little Velvet Underground and TV on the Radio on ‘Honey,’ here we get a David Bowie bridge in the last half; it has that resolutely awkward thing that Bowie does. It’s clear at this point that Dear, on Black City, wants to blend prog-pop and recent electronic music production techniques. It’s immediately recognisable as Dear—for anyone who has heard his previous solo album, Asa Breed—but the canvas is broad, the inspirations less obvious. Fidgety Talking Heads feel; a bit of Can in here too; maybe some Gary Numan? This can’t be pinned on any one inspiration. There’s a guitar line that sounds like a tin of tomatoes is being pressed against the strings. Tasty.

‘Little People (Black City)’ gives us full-on Bowie now with, what’s that, Balearic chord washes and a disco beat. This is quite a little fruitcake. ‘Little People’ cuts through some of the darkness of the openers. Maybe we’ve arrived at the ballroom in Dear’s House of Mirrors. Except the discoball is blinding and everyone’s clambering along the walls, lost, confused. We’re supposed to be having a good time, but someone’s on the mic, splitting their vocals into six octaves. Like The Knife, only more sing-song. ‘Little People’ holds us hostage in the ballroom for nine minutes. The direct bass hook is a disco killer. But Dear can’t help making the whole thing dark. A cowbell has never sound quite so menacing. The wavering, multi-tracked voice on the chorus defies any generic call to have a good time on the dancefloor, celebrate love, life, drugs, the weekend etc. Glassy high synths portend something that never quite comes—and that’s even worse than something that does. About halfway through weird, deep, slow ‘oh’ vocal sounds emerge from someone’s lower gut. Dear is playing with time again here. The length of the track—the longest here by a stretch—allows experimentation as the song unfurls. As Monolake once said, it doesn’t matter where you put the kick. At the length of nine minutes, hypnosis takes over and it’s the changes you notice. Before you know it, he’s singing ‘love me like a clown’. By the last third, we’re hanging out with the Liars as voices and guitars commence a séance underneath the discoball. Believe it. Someone starts shaking a syncopated lagerphone. Pitch shifted voices laugh and joke as the song ends. What?

‘Slowdance’—the title gets it about right; a slow twirl; drum pads; shaker; half-speed house; regretful lyrics; New Order style guitar; mumbled, confused, dreamlike, half-awake vocals. They were my notes as I listened. ‘I can’t begin to tell you that everything’s fine,’ he sings. At this point, Dear’s not even pretending that he’s happy. That about gets at it. There’s an Oompa Loompa ending to this song which I’ve taken to humming in the shower and intoning in the kitchen as I make lunch. Even the cat’s freaked out by it. Dear puts the fun into menace.

Next is ‘Soil to Seed,’ the song which, in pre-release, got me excited about this album. It’s the most ‘live band’ sounding of anything here or anything Dear’s ever done—but even then, not really. It rocks an easy groove for a couple of verses and then it’s done. Two and a bit minutes. Perfect. Rubbery mid-range bass work, almost like someone noodling absentmindedly with their brother’s baritone guitar. There’s a slow piling on of instruments, ideas and texture. It’s an old trick, particularly in dance music, where the structure is less beholden to verse-chorus-verse blocks and is far more linear. It’s this slightly different approach to structure and sound, bequeathed by years of work as Audion, False and Jabberjaw, that Dear is making the most of on Black City.

The LP sits in no category for very long, as it ranges from a ‘band song’ to something like ‘You Put a Smell on Me’. This is the techiest thing here by far, a forceful reminder that Dear knows his club music. A thumping Detroit-via-Berlin beat is rendered in half time, then overlaid with oscillations and arpeggios; it keeps building. I wrote down some names. Prince. Jimmy Edgar. Drexciya. Dopplereffekt. And some adjectives. Menacing. Gleaming. Industrial. Capital letters now: SEX! Weird sex! Sung in Dear’s creepiest baritone. Liars via Prince at the end: as he tells/sings/frightens his object of affection with news of the ‘little red nightgown’ he has waiting for he/she at his ‘big black house’.

‘Shortwave’ saunters in with a sing-song bassline. An unnerving blending of vocal lines, which feel chopped and stretched, wafts over the song. He’s still singing something about a ‘fabulous mansion’. But, again, the whole song moves at a pace that sits on the ‘creepy’ side of lagging. ‘Shortwave’ proves the unsettling effects of delivering a song at an unorthodox tempo—either too fast or too slow can render a genre uncanny. So the track’s lullaby chorus at this tempo is bizarre. Dear can’t abide the weirdness for the full length, as the vocals pretty up when the multiple harmonies flit around one another in the last half of the song. But then they’re strange again when Dear sends the individual notes skittering off into air, like pieces of paper blown on the breeze. Then he collects them again into a little sea shanty ending. Nothing settles into place for too long.

‘Monkey’ puts us back inside chanting Liars territory at the start, melodically at least. The beat and bass are captivating. Shakers and woodblocks hold down a hypnotic rhythm. For the first half, it feels like you’ve walked into a jam that started 25 minutes ago and now everyone’s wild eyed, locked in and losing track of time; then the song tilts on its axis as Dear shifts vocal register and new, bright harmonies start percolating. Like most of Black City, you could stare at this Magic Eye picture for hours and not know how the hell it works, how that effect comes from these elements. Great.

In ‘More Surgery’, Dear sings ‘this local sedative makes the body slow’ and ‘I’m in love with ghosts, when I feel alone’. That’s about the measure of it. In its obtuse lyrics and arch delivery, there’s something very Talking Heads about this track. But it doesn’t necessarily sound like them. Dear’s working in a musically pared back mode here (bare bones!). Live bass guitar sound again against the steady pulse of a (hospital?) machine; a sci-fi soundtrack feel emerges as woolly synths deliver simple chords and pinging notes. Ethereal. Psychedelic. Soporific. Drugged. Morphine? Jetlagged? Chopped up voices murmur throughout, like hushed conversations drifting down a hallway at night, their content unclear, their menace undeniable.

The album closes off with ‘Gem’. Here again, like ‘Honey,’ we get no drums, electronic or live. Instead, muffled synths sit behind crystalline piano notes. Dear’s voice is still multi-tracked, split into his trademark octaves. In all, a recipe for cheesiness. But, by this point, the album feels like it’s earned this. A ballad in keeping with the rest of the LP. The synths chirrup and stumble at points. The way isn’t smooth. There’s something that sounds like a person cackling, or seagulls fighting over a chip. It’s just far enough in the back of the mix that you have to concentrate to hear it properly—focus directly on it and it slips away. But it disturbs the smooth tones. This might be a ballad, but you’d have to be tone deaf to feel lulled and wistful in listening to it.

Nothing settles into place for too long.

Ben Gook