Matthew Dear Black City Colored Vinyl Edition

Matthew Dear's Black City can't be found on any map. It's a composite, an imaginary
metropolis peopled by desperate cases, lovelorn souls, and amoral motives. Like
most literary Gothams, Black City is a place to love and hate, as seedy as a
nightclub's back room and as seductive as the promise of power. Matthew Dear, the
musician, may live in New York City, but the Matthew Dear of Black City inhabits a
sound-world unlike any other: a monument to the shadowy side of urban life that
bumps and creaks, shudders and wakes up screaming in the middle of the night.
Black City is Matthew Dear's third album on Ghostly International, and it's his
darkest and most engrossing work to date. From the first notes of album opener
"Honey", it's clear that the love-obsessed Matthew Dear of 2007's Asa Breed has
given way to a more existentially paranoid entity, as creeping tempos dominate,
cavernous atmospherics envelop the listener, and strange distortions crackle on the
horizon. In Black City, nothing is at it seems: leadoff single "Little People (Black
City)" is a nine-and-a-half minute disco odyssey, subverting its gleaming electronic
lead with eerily giddy backing vocals and cryptic, ominous lyrics ("a frozen wasted
heart / has died", "love me like a clown"); "You Put a Smell on Me" is a sordid sex
romp set to hysterically chattering percussion and a serrated synth line that will set
your teeth on edge; "More Surgery" at first recalls the barely-there Krautrock of
Harmonia in its burbling minimalism, until Dear's chanted chorus of "Alter genetics /
to make my body glow / I need more surgery / there's so much more to know"
sends the track hurtling into a dystopian future. And yet, for all the foreboding
moods on Black City, it's the album's sweeter moments that illustrate Matthew
Dear's growing maturity as a songwriter. "Slowdance" is a futuristic lullaby in which
Dear articulates a lover's helplessness ("I can't be the one to tell you everything's
wrong") over breathy, Arthur Russell-esque cello swishes; the album-closing "Gem"
is an achingly simple, reverb-drenched piano ballad that ends with a long, slow fade.
Even in Matthew Dear's Black City, there is hope.