Matthew and the Atlas - To The North (Communion)
4/5
By: Kevin Molloy
Matt Hegarty's newly found band have taken on one of those all-encompassing monikers that you kind of need to live up to with 'The Atlas'. Plus, surely Atlas isn't a plural and therefore doesn't quite qualify as a 'the band' name? But we digress...
'I Will Remain' is a stupendous opener for this 4 track EP - Hegarty and crew lead you through a romping folk journey, full of lyrical travelling tropes, pastoral longing, handclaps, multi-part harmony, seasonal shifts , banjo uplifts, finger-picked tender moments, and sailing chorus lines. And all of this you only come to realise after the initial listen, as a kind of afterthought.
Your first thoughts, in fact, are to wonder where on earth a voice like that has been hiding, how many cigarettes and whiskeys you would need to emulate it, and whether you've fallen unconditionally in love with that swooning croon, or if you'll be unable to listen to the EP a second time. To the best of our knowledge there's no familial link, and certainly no musical one, but this is the second Hegarty-voice dilemma we've found ourselves facing, under much the same circumstances.
Luckily (Matthew) Hegarty's voice not only bears a second listen, but even insists on it. There are nuances to the delivery, wrapped up in an anatomy-defying gravelly warmth, that will keep you coming back time after time.
The melodies promised are huge, but to Hegarty's credit, he refuses to whittle them to the melodic dust and frippery his voice would be more than capable of - these have more the feel of a blue-collar chorus, to be sung together in folk circles, or to tell the solitary listener that their heartache is not theirs alone.
There's ambition-a-plenty here too - the last reprise of 'In Winter' is the kind of showstopper you'd forgotten about: hearts firmly on their sleeves, The Atlas join Hegarty in swelling the folk leanings of the preceeding two minutes into a stadium-sized anthem, but with a nod to humility keeping the whole affair well under four minutes total. And it's that kind of control that makes us so excited not only about this little offering, but about the future ones - there's a craft to these songs that, if Hegarty and co. can repeat and improve, will happily follow in the globe conquering steps of the current British folk excursionaries.
Artists in this article: Matthew & the Atlas
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