Matthew Dear: Fear the Dear

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Matthew Deer (middle) chills courtside with MF Doom and Yao Ming

Matthew Dear – Monkey

Matthew Dear – Honey

Two disparate and awesome new tracks from Matthew Dear’s Black City, the brooding “Honey” (reminds me of Brian McMahan’s post-Slint project The For Carnation) and a brooding goth-song with a Madchester backbeat, “Monkey.”

Dear’s productions are noticeably overproduced, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing – just a way to categorize the sounds on the album. The overproduction aids Dear’s sound, actually: it lends a sense of track-by-track differentiation to his drums, which would otherwise probably be too canned and universally Kraut-rocky but are instead impactful and wild in range (it also separates him from too closely resembling LCD Soundsystem – wise, given the latter’s everywhere-ness and the subsequent inevitable backlash); it helps mask the likelihood that, beneath Dear’s dense, melodramatic, and effects-laden vocals, is the flat and breathy voice of a dorky electro producer; and finally, it works to the advantage of Dear’s minimal composition style, drawing our attention not to the melodic nature of his synthesizers (he writes these parts percussively, every four beats or so) but to their lush, immaculate design.

Black City is a pop album full of melodies that are more gestural and conservative than, you know, actually catchy and fun. But he’s either smart enough or seasoned enough to know that you can mask weakness by exaggerating strength. Though it fails as a pop album, Black City is, like a LeBron James championship run, worth attention for impressive spectacle in which it fails – worth attention, in spite of itself, for the beauty surrounding the failure. This album is a buffet of sounds, each of which has been laboriously designed, most of which are unique and sparkly and fun, and very few of which overtly resemble the album’s general sense of tribute to the DFA, The Knife, and David Bowie’s larynx.  Listen to it, and imagine yourself in Berlin, looking for an erotic massage and then an oil change.