Plumbiferous Media

Detroit electro-pop artist Matthew Dear started releas­ing music in 1999, fol­lowed by his first LP, 2003’s Leave Luck to Heaven. Since then, Dear has devel­oped his own dis­tinct style of music, com­bin­ing techno, house, and pop to cre­ate his own sound. Dear’s fourth album, Black City, released last week, is, while not entirely suc­cess­ful, an inter­est­ing devel­op­ment of his sound.

When at the top of his game, Matthew Dear uses a wealth of syn­thetic sounds to cre­ate an immer­sive envi­ron­ment that tries its best to pull the lis­tener through Dear’s mind. That works excep­tion­ally well on tracks like “Honey” (which devel­ops a deep, lethar­gic flow of sound punc­tu­ated by inten­tional glitches that serve as focal points). Unfor­tu­nately, it does not always work that well. “I Can’t Feel“‘s heav­ily abbre­vi­ated notes quickly become far too aggres­sive, and cou­pled with the peri­odic squeaks and squeals, the track quickly becomes irritating.

Addi­tion­ally, occa­sional bouts of drawn out, repet­i­tive sec­tions, espe­cially preva­lent when the vocals drop out, plague the album. That said, Black City does do well when it comes to diver­sity. There are a num­ber of styles that Dear clearly favors, but every track on the album is unique, and the result is an album that has a wealth of sounds, but is far from overly diverse or disconnected.

Dear tends to use his voice as an instru­ment, heav­ily lay­er­ing it with synth, allow­ing it to blend in well with the rest of Black City’s sound. When this is suc­cess­ful, it helps to deepen the sound, giv­ing Dear’s music an addi­tional layer in the form of his voice. When less suc­cess­ful, it tends to turn the music into a sort of unchang­ing grind, and when it fails com­pletely - for­tu­nately, not very often - it becomes gen­uinely annoy­ing. Obvi­ously, the first case is the most desire­able - and so it’s unsur­pris­ing that the album would ben­e­fit if that case showed up more often.

Given the elec­tronic sound of Dear’s music, it’s unsur­pris­ing that the lyrics are gen­er­ally both fairly sim­ple and sur­real. In an approach that is entirely in tune the way he uses his voice, Dear uses his words as a direc­tion for his voice, choos­ing his words to cre­ate his desired sound. That’s not to say that Dear’s lyrics are irrel­e­vant except in their sound - sim­ple as they may be, they help to set the tone of Black City, though cer­tainly not as much as does the music.

It’s hard to decide whether Black City has its moments or whether there are just moments where Matthew Dear doesn’t shine. There are good tracks and bad tracks, some­times good sec­tions and bad sec­tions, but Dear is either on or off. Some of Black City is just not worth lis­ten­ing to, and the rest makes up for it, but there’s not all that much that is just there. Every­thing, for bet­ter or worse, serves a pur­pose on Black City, and we applaud Dear for that, even if the album aver­ages out to be quite, well, average.

This post is tagged 50-59, Matthew Dear