MatadorMark Eitzel —the mopey, monobrow'd, miserablist maverick best known for moaning his bleakly-funny barfly's tales in American Music Club— has made two totally stunning albums in a career otherwise categorised by chronic underachievement. One of them is AMC's 1993 masterwork, Mercury. The other is this one. Taking its title —in full: Caught In A Trap and I Can't Back Out 'Cause I Love You Too Much, Baby— from Elvis's "Suspicious Minds," Eitzel's hoarse voice and spare, barely-in-tune acoustic guitar capture the spirit of the down-and-out. Turning motel-rooms and dive-bars into cathedrals, the songwriter chronicles the underbelly of American society, his songworld inhabited by lost souls hanging desperately to their last threads of faith.
MatadorFalkirk duo Arab Strap were the audio equivalent to Scottish cinema's grim socio-realism: making miserablism into art. The band grew grow more expansive as they progressed, but their second record was a work of staunch reductionism: a plodding drum-machine, Malcolm Middleton's melancholic guitar, and Aidan Moffat literally speaking his lacerating, sailor-mouthed lyrics over the top. Philophobia —definition: an irrational fear of love and intimacy— takes its cues from Moffat's cultivated poetic persona, effectively a caustic, rock'n'roll take on Charles Bukowski. Across Philophobia's slow, brutal plod, Moffat delivers a comic trail of carnal, drunken, angry anecdotes; coming off like a bitter bar-fly propping up one end of a depressing bar.
MatadorYeah, sure, this is technically cheating.
Mass Romantic didn't really come out on Matador; it was first issued on Canadian indie Mint, and later reissued by Matador in time to sit alongside 2003's
Electric Version. But, any chance to put this indie/power-pop/Destroyer-affiliated LP on a list is a chance to take. The debut New Pornographers album stands as one of the biggest, brightest examples of Matador's approach to signing bands: go for established, known names. Their demo-submission-policy has long been a rejection of that idea: don't send us demos, go out and make an amazing album. And given how many
best of the decade lists
Mass Romantic ended up on at the end of the '00s, I'd say it qualifies.
MatadorThere's few album concepts as hackneyed as the "journey through music," that staple, stated goal of any and all DJ sets. Fittingly, Keigo Oyamada's fourth album as Cornelius —Point, which is subtitled From Nakameguro to Everywhere— has a disc-jockeying sensbility. Like some meta-conceptual crate-digger, Oyamada paws through the refuse of pan-genre popular-culture, fashioning an array of audio sources —from high-brow to low-, sonic wizardry to ironic kitsch— into a singular whole. Using the studio as an instrument, the king of Tokyo's Shibuya-kei scene (of whom the awesome Pizzicato Five, another Matador alumnus, was a part), cut-and-pasted his way to a densely-woven, impishly experimental, wantonly harmonic vision of shiny, futurist pop.
MatadorSomewhere along the line,
Interpol became funny: a parody of themselves, all Paul Banks' foghorn vox and stadium-sized mood music, Joy Division jones and black-shirt/grey-overcoat band shots. The common view of them, as their career has produced albums of diminishing returns, is as humorless, gunning for a Grammy, and kind of not very good, especially when it comes to lyrics. But, on its 2002 release,
Turn On the Bright Lights made people go crazy (
Pitchfork album of the year!). It was a big, anthemic rock record with cred; an album that got better with repeated spins; a band mining influences (Joy Division, Cure, Echo) not overplayed in '02; and, well, given all the Strokes-inspired denim-on-denim mania of the day, it actually was nice to see a band in shirts and trousers.
MatadorAfter years of fraught dreaming, fearful stage-fright, and all-consuming writer’s block, the idiosyncratic Chan Marshall erupted out the other side a liberated woman. Finally facing up to her follow-up to the almighty Moon Pix, Marshall celebrated her emancipation from the demons that'd both driven her and dragged her down —and, if we're to believe We Are Free's astonishing opener, "I Don't Blame You," no longer tormented by the burden of audience expectation— Marshall fashioned an unexpectedly poignant set, highlighted by the impossibly, transcendently beautiful "Maybe Not." In the face of such sublime artistry, the fact that this was the album that took Cat Power from cult figure to bonafide celebrity seems almost incidental.
MatadorBrightblack Morning Light were popularly conceived of as
freak-folk fops: a pair of barefoot, back-to-the-land hippies of the same bearded ilk as Devendra Banhart, Espers et al. Sure, the first record they made, as Brightblack, 2004's
Ala.cali.tucky, sounded like the Grateful Dead, but, by the time they were calling themselves Brightblack Morning Light and singing to Matador, their music didn't match their wardrobe. Playing slow-motion, narcotized funk in which buttery organ chords, strung-out slide guitar, and twitters of flute/horns locked into repetitious grooves over cymbal-kissing drums, they were effectively peddling an unwashed, snail's-pace take on space-rock; a successor to the gospel hosannas of
Spiritualized and the trance-outs of Jessamine.
MatadorAfter a decade of increasingly-conceptual albums, San Franciscan sample scientists Matmos swung for the bleachers with this career-defining enshrinement of their heroes. Helped by pals like Björk, Antony, Zeena Parkins, and Safety Scissors, the Matmos chaps pay musical homage to the likes of futurist record-producer Joe Meek, Germs vocalist Darby Crash, and King Ludwig II of Bavaria the only way they know how: with crazy samples. Having garnered acclaim for "playing" rabbit pelts, human skulls, and the synapses of a crayfish, here Matmos tell their subject's stories through sampled source sound; like reversing a vacuum's flow into a cow's reproductive tract to create "vaginal farts" for their tribute to Andy Warhol attacker Valerie Solanos.
MatadorWhen Matador inked shitgaze upstarts Times New Viking, it was almost a case of history repeating. Like Guided by Voices —a band they were openly indebted to— Times New Viking played rough, raucous, ultra-
lo-fi rock'n'roll. And they hailed from Ohio. And their Matador signing was a sign o' the times: when GBV jumped to Matador in 1994, it marked the official crossover of lo-fi; when TNV made the move, it signaled that the lo-fi revival was ready to bring badly-recorded, bleeding-edge, in-the-red records back to the indie masses.
Rip It Off ripped off sixteen short, scrappy, scuzzy tracks, which buried pop-hooks and twee giddiness underneath so much tape-hiss and overdriven tone that it played like a mis-tuned radio, making familiar rock elements sound alien and strange.
MatadorGarage-rock reprobate Jay Reatard had a checkered history prior to arriving in Matador's arms; fronting a string of nasty, noisy, provocative combos —The Reatards, The Lost Sounds— infamous for caustic stage-shows and in-band acrimony. Solo, Reatard could call all the shots, and after signing to Matador in the wake of his solo debut, 2006's
Blood Visions, he set about sharpening his chops on a run of seven-inch singles. The influence of the British Invasion —or, perhaps, the British Invasion via Guided by Voices— loomed large over a set of increasingly anthemic, sharply recorded songs. Across his Matador tenure, Reatard would grow from obscure wild-child to member of the indie establishment, and his
death in 2010 was a tragedy to many.
