Matthew Dear, Black City
Turns out the versatile producer-DJ can also write a mean pop song
Matthew Dear's 2003 debut, Leave Luck to Heaven, proved that dance music could appeal to the finicky indie-rock crowd, boasting songs that had just enough relatable elements — vocals, guitar — for those stuck in a "dance music = rave" mindset. (It didn't hurt that the sloe-eyed brunet is easy on the eyes.) Black City, Dear's fourth, largely excellent album, demonstrates that the versatile producer-DJ can also write a mean pop song — albeit a pop song that traverses an alien universe filled with sonic equivalent of boogymen.
On Black City, Dear has honed his singing chops to match his studio-production finesse. On previous albums, Dear's vocals played a mostly minor role, but here they sound like major plot points. City is slower than its predecessors; gone are the glitchy breaks that got Dear slapped with a "microhouse" label in the early aughts. That's not to say Black City isn't sexy: "I Can't Feel" rides a funky atonal bassline all the way to a squelchy guitar breakdown; "Little People (Black City)," the centerpiece of the album, uncoils deliberately over a brilliant nine minutes, morphing from 4/4 house to '80s synth-pop with an avant-punk twist. But Dear's City is a dark one, full of love lost as quickly as it is found; Pynchonian characters drowning in waves of existential angst ("All of these days into one/ Awaken to the silence of the sun/ Who can I talk with today/ Why am I still the same?" on the synth-filled ballad, "Gem.") Thematically speaking, is Black City so different from, say, an Arcade Fire album? No — and maybe that's a good thing: Dance music isn't know for grand social proclamations, and Black City, as oblique and as funky as it may be, is saying something about the way we lead our scattered urban lives, surrounded by millions but often so terribly alone.
