Matty Ride - Matty Ride [EP]

Matty Ride - Matty Ride [EP]
2014, Matty Ride

Disco, pop, hip-hop and soul.  Welcome to the world of Matty Ride, a retro-pop musical chemist based out of Nashville, Tennessee.  With a pleasing voice and an effervescent energy, Ride revives and blends pop music styles from the last 30 years into an eclectic, yet still relevant, ganache.  His latest effort, a five-song self-titled EP, shows why there is room for guys like Matty Ride in today’s dance clubs and on the charts.

Ride opens with the wispy pop confection "That Girl", which has enough snap to be danceable but is light enough to get caught up in the pop ether of Top 40 radio. The songwriting is compact and driven by an infectious hook that will keep calling listeners back. The only downfall is the breakdown in the last 45 seconds of the track, which could (and should) be cut from a single release without any loss to the listener.  "All Over Again" is straight ahead, angst-filled pop. It's solid album material with a bit of Matthew Wilder flair. "Come on and Dance" is as flagrantly bubblegum as 1980's soul/pop ever was, and is likely to inspire seriously mistaken déjà vu or those who grew up in the 1980's.

"First Day of Summer" is an overexcited piece of fluff that tries to sound modern but ends up very dated. There is serious hook action at work here, but the song is almost a caricature of 1980's dance/pop acts. The video, on the other hand, will give the song serious life.  It’s a fun little cinematic escape that features miniature musicians, flying cars and a uniquely comic sensibility that chronicles what happens when geek meet chic.  Matty Ride slows it all down for the closing number, "Hold Me Closer". The ballad is a sleepy affair that sounds melancholy in spite of its protestations of undying love. Ride does a pretty decent job on the vocal, but there's no vitality to the arrangement.

Matty Ride is a serious musician, but at the end of the day he doesn’t take himself too seriously.  The Matty Ride EP is a fun excursion of retro pop with a modern edge.  There are a couple of missteps here, but nothing overly critical.  Fans of pop, dance pop and light soul are going to dig this big time.

Rating: 3.5 Stars (Out of 5)

Learn more at www.mattyride.com.  In the mean time, check out Matty Ride's video for "First Day of Summer"!

Review: Chris Huff - Death And Texas

Chris Huff - Death And Texas
2008, Help Us Find Food Records

Chris Huff speaks/plays a musical patois that is unique in popular culture. He's played/sung classical piano, jazz bass, folk and rock guitar, a cappella, opera, gospel, bluegrass... you name it; he's done it. And it's all here. Death And Texas is the ultimate "gumbo", where styles blend and fold into one another until the differentiated ingredients give up their respective identities to some new musical identify that has yet to acquire a name.

Listening to the opening track, Hey Now Now, I couldn’t get the vocal similarities between Chris Huff and Peter Gabriel out of my head. Huff could be mistaken for Gabriel on the virtue of his voice. Granted Gabriel has never been known to play Matthew Wilder style pop-reggae, but it could happen. Huff sets us straight on Oceans Never Freeze, taking us on tour of his eclectic musical mind. The song veers from big Max Webster style alt-punk to classic rock opus with some Beach Boys harmonies and New Music dissonance thrown in for good measure. Ghosts Of The Past and Lost In The Mausoleum continue the disintegration into post-modern sound. Each song starts with clear melody and slowly devolves to the point of sounds overlaying one another at random.

My personal favorite here is For The Trees, a dark and dirty blues/reggae hybrid. While For The Trees generally avoids the sonic cavalcade of sounds that become some of its countrymen, the Lo-Fi sound here is a perfect complement to the song itself. Neighborhood (Ain’t It Time) harkens back to the 1960’s as a strong period song. Then We’re Dead is fun little punker where Huff sounds vaguely like Ian Anderson on vocals. The album closes out with The Cause, which may be the most well-written song on the CD.

Chris Huff has some interesting divergences on his way to becoming a good songwriter. He has a strong sense of melody and song construction but is also enamored with musical deconstructionism a bit. Death And Texas is a fun listen; at times confounding, but ultimately worth the trip.

Rating: 3.5 Stars (Out of 5)

You can learn more about Chris Huff at http://www.huffmusic.com/, where you can purchase a copy of Death And Texas.