Top 10 Matador Albums

When Matador unveiled the debut album from Fall-riffing, ad-hoc poetic, archly ironic, slap-dash slackers Pavement, the label was still a fledgling affair. Yet, when Slanted and Enchanted suddenly summoned up the power of popularity, the label came into both cash and cachet; Matador acquiring a reputation of ‘cool’ it still is yet to shed. And it all comes back to this: Pavement’s increasingly-influential art-rock classic a cracking set of submerged-pop whose melodies snap whip-smart whilst the guitar-signal dips and crackles.

No one can suggest that Liz Phair’s instantly-acclaimed debut album means as much now as it did then, back when. Born in an era in which ‘Women In Rock’ were a gawp-worthy novelty, Phair talked a revolutionary game, daring to playfully mock rock mythology. Calling Exile In Guyville a “song by song” response to the Rolling Stones’ swaggering, staggering “classic” Exile On Main Street, Phair dared rewrite rock’n’roll’s heinous clichés from the lady’s perspective. Her blushingly frank take on modern sexual entanglements gave a face, a voice, and a name to the women who, 20 years earlier, could’ve only found one place in rock culture: groupie.

Ohio elementary-school teacher turned drunken rock’n’roll evangelist Bob Pollard could stake a claim for being one of the most prolific artists in music history. The undisputed king of the lo-fi movement, Pollard’s fondness for at-home recording —and the tape-hiss that came with— allowed him to amass huge archives of off-the-cuff recordings. Alien Lanes marks Pollard’s first ‘proper’ album as Guided By Voices, and it’s a glittering showcase for a man, and a band, at the peak of those powers: casting off melodically memorable, British Invasion-evoking pop-songs with a studied, sudsy, buddying casualness.

By the time Matador got around to releasing Belle and Sebastian in America, a veritable cult had already grown around the Scottish indie-poppers. Fronted by the alternately sentimental and sardonic songsmith-supreme Stuart Murdoch, the band sounded like an alarmingly-twee marriage of Donovan, Felt, and The Smiths; making the bookish British bedsit aesthetic seem endlessly charming and wondrously romantic. Record-shopping weenies of the world suddenly harboured dreams of uniting and taking over, stirred by such rallying cries as the ever-glorious “Judy and the Dream of Horses.”

Variety may be the spice of life, but rarely does it make for good records. Yet, Yo La Tengo wore the genre-jumping jumper well on I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One, the album that took them from under-the-radar, noise-guitar cult act to indie institution. Perhaps because they’re confessed students of pop history, it somehow makes sense hearing Yo La Tengo rewrite Bacharach, cover the Beach Boys, and ape Neil Young whilst switching from fuzz-pop to shoegaze soundscape to, uh, jazz-funk workout.

Though strangely unacclaimed in her day —and even in this day— Mary Timony has found pop-cultural fortune shift in her favour; hindsight now viewing her magickal, mystical, maligned-on-release The Magic City through rosy shades. Long before bearded boys started waving the freak-folk banner, Timony was coloring in her storybook wonderlands of witchcraft and dragons with kitschy keytone zaps, mordant medieval disharmonies, fretboard-frying acid-folk flourish, and earnest prog-rock dagginess. Forging into a rainbow-age aesthetic totally out-of-place in the mid-’90s, Timony was trussed up in indie-princess-cum-Dungeon-Master threads years before Joanna Newsom would even get out of high-school.

Mark 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.

Openly evoking the hoary notion of the “journey through music,” Keigo Oyamada’s fourth album as Cornelius showed him embodying the familiar, romanticised notion of the crate-diggin’, dusty-vinyl-rescuing DJ: pawing through the refuse of pan-genre popular-culture, fashioning an array of audio sources into a singular whole. Using the studio as instrument, the king of Tokyo’s so-called Shibuya-kei scene cut-and-pasted his way to a densely-woven, impishly experimental, wantonly harmonic vision of shiny, futurist pop.

After 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. Celebrating her emancipation from the demons that’d both driven her and dragged her down —and, if we’re to believe 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 artistry, that this album took Cat Power to a whole new audience seems almost incidental.

After 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 Valerie Solanos tribute.