Matthew Ryan - Matthew Ryan vs. The Silver State

by Tom Mendelsohn

Matthew Ryan vs The Dead Horse

"This is the kind of rubbish which conservative bone-heads call ‘real music’"

Old people should not be allowed to make music. No exceptions. Where old people make music, that music is bad. Relative oldster Matthew Ryan is a great example of this, making as he does execrably grizzled music for other people with age-dulled critical faculties. This is the kind of rubbish which conservative bone-heads call ‘real music’: good honest working-class straight up and down 4/4 trad-rock, and it is as dire as it is offensively unadventurous.

Not all music can be a boundary-expanding wonder-opus; it doesn’t have to be, to be considered worthwhile. Matthew Ryan, though, has made a record staggering in its obnoxious triteness, dashed it off and presented as ‘honest’ and ‘meaningful’ when it is anything but. In fact, it’s crass and unsubtle, aimlessly bombastic and wilfully foageyish, and it smothers itself – and the listener – in a choking blanket of its own earnestness.

Should you still be interested in it musically, it sounds like the worst and most colourless excesses of the grandstanding Americana in whose tradition it stands. In effect, it’s a rasp-voiced lunk alternately impersonating Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and the slow heat-death of the universe, across eleven clotted songs about lost love. For fans of The Hold Steady, whiskey-soaked reminiscence and the grinding sound of unremitting bullshit.
bad ass said on April 26th 2008 [report abuse]

how u described his music is very good, but you know shit and that is the point to start when u wright about something, and obviously you have very good taste in music :)). prfrrrrrrrr

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