Matmos - 'The Civil War' (Matador)
3/5
By: Toby L
Medieval-electro? It doesn't quite gel now, does it? Wrong.
Well, sort of wrong. Confessedly, Matmos' sixth studio-LP 'The Civil War' has all the initial selling-power of a pane of glass that's already cracking at the edges - but like its allied, dishevelled piece of simile-based apparatus, the thrill comes in the intricacy of its lacking conformity to design.
This is one studied work you're not gonna avoid in a hurry (no matter how much you'll try). Clangs and dongs of all shapes and proportions - via bells, keyboards, guitars, violins, banjos, brass, something called a 'dobro' - what's so instantly appealing to 'The Civil War' is its utter disregard for anything in the way of structure, compositions hovering and veering from the somewhat avant-garde to the utterly pretentious in the same amount of time it takes to exclaim, 'Hoxton!' to the top of your lungs.
Yet, amidst the muso-awkwardness comes what we should emblazon the 'reward-factor': scintillating waves of relaxo-tronica that sift through the otherwise frantic, wild, lucid torrents of sheer noise and massage a Technicolor©, Lemon Jelly-like exuberance and innocence to proceedings. And when 'TCW' is at its starkest, the work is at its most warming and instant (reference-check: the percussive sharpness of 'For The Trees').
A half-dozen of albums down the line, however, and to sound quite so innovative as present-era Matmos is one mean feat - one mean feat, indeed, that seldom relents across the entire span of its bumpy, yet no less sturdy journey.
Artists in this article: Matmos
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