Eric Matthews
The Lateness of the Hour (Sub Pop)
by Nik Rainey
Under the carefully-cultivated unwashed exterior of my average adolescence lay a deep, dark secret, one I’ve never been able to bring myself to admit until now. By day, I was a typical teenager, maintaining a strong D+ average, joining in the normal grimy packs with my no-account buddies, guzzling beer from cans emblazoned with pictures of mongrel dogs and strange waterfowl, bobbing our heads like spastic pistons to the latest piece of mechanized retch bereft of all redeeming social or musical value. Nobody suspected I was living a lie. At night, I would bar myself in my bedroom, stuff the cracks in the windows and doors with damp towels, turn off all the lights and… (choke)… pull out my copies of Forever Changes, Heaven in a Wildflower, and Imperial Bedroom and indulge my secret desire for lushly-orchestrated pop sophistry.
I can divulge this now, so many years after the fact, because the examples of my elders have given me strength. No longer does a taste for acoustic guitars, woodwinds, and strings automatically brand you an outcast in our society, traversing the town square in chastened disgrace with a Dream of the Blue Turtles CD hanging around your neck. Underneath the bleach-stained Seven Mary Three t-shirts of some of our coarsest, most upslouching citizens, lie hearts that beat like the metronomes used by session musicians rented from the nearest philharmonic. Look around you – they’re your delinquent older brothers, your perpetually unemployed uncles with the uneven sideburns, even your Northwest record labels best known for their flat, utilitarian punk/metal albums. Yes, even Sub Pop has proven vulnerable to the rich modern classicism shamelessly offered up by Eric Matthews, an uncloseted romanticist who packs more mature pop sensibility into a single measure than an entire posse of fretboard-throttlers could manage in a lifetime if they had Phil Spector’s gun trained on their shaggy heads. The Lateness of the Hour, his second solo album (after a notable debut alongside like-minded songwriter Richard Davies as Cardinal), does not rock in any accepted sense of the word. Instead, it evokes the same feeling brought on by the finest pop – the best feeling in the world: the warm, melancholic pull of September twilight, a state of grace as delicious as it is fleeting. The same holds true of Matthews’ songs, from the dusky strength of his voice, to the exquisite balance of his arrangements, and the propensity to fade them out before you have the chance to wring all the bliss out of them. An astounding feat of restraint, taste, and equilibrium – most writers fall back on shopworn Wilson/Walker/Drake comparisons as antecedents, conveniently forgetting that these guys only got the proportions right for a very short time before going nuts, getting weird, or dying young. Matthews is far too contrary and arrogant to let that happen. You can be assured that he’ll be sending teen-spirits of all ages to their rooms to furtively tickle their inner bliss for some time to come.
