I’m gonna talk about the Mountain Goats first, and you’re gonna wonder
why, so I’ll just come out and say it – Matthew Squires is a dead ringer for
John Darnielle, voicewise. Well, I guess he’s not a 100% perfect match (who is to anybody?), but it’s pretty damn close.
Close enough that your enjoyment of the Mountain Goats will likely pave the way
for your enjoyment of this tape.
Good thing, then, that I happen to dig on some Mountain Goats from time
to time. I’m on board.
Squires, and his band the Learning Disorders, play a brand of low-key
indie indebted to everyone from the Byrds to Figurines, the Danish pop band
whose singer, Christian Hjelm, Squires also
kind of sounds like, especially on standouts “Devotional #2” and the title
track. (Also the Prayers and Tears of Arthur Digby Sellers – anyone remember
them? They covered the Mountain Goats one time.) Heck, pretty much any nasally
voiced frontman with some folk and some rock in his repertoire could be called
upon as a stylistic touchstone.
The jangle should be no surprise – Squires is from Austin, Texas, where
jangle and barbecue and South By (that’s SXSW for you ignoramuses) rule pretty
much every aspect of modern living. And Squires takes his Texan heritage
seriously, apparently – or maybe not so much, I can’t tell – in roster
construction. From Fartbook: the band is “Matthew Squires and a rotating lineup
of people who he forces to play with him at gun point. Shows can be pretty
intense.”
Only in Texas!
But still, this turns out to be the kind of rainy-day, sad bastard
music that I turn to every once in a while. We need that sometimes – good lord,
we need it. We all do. You’ll go crazy if you listen to the Beach Boys or
Weezer nonstop. Crazy, I tells ya! So when heartbroken Matthew sings on “Echo,”
“I am an echo. One voice torn in two. I am a memory of you,” I get a little
verklempt, you know? You know? Or try
my personal fave, “Trophy Song”: “And here we are, we are emptying ourselves.
This is greater than any trophy we could fit on our shelves.” I’m not a
terribly sentimental person, but I love this stuff. I eat it right up.
Looks like Already Dead Tapes – an absolute institution! – has already
run a second pressing of these bad boys – I’ve got 50/50 of this batch. But
Matthew Squires and the Learning Disorders deserves to be heard on a bigger
platform – I’d love to hear this crackle through stereo speakers from 180-gram
vinyl. But this is a cassette blog, and this is a cassette, so you’re left in
this situation. While we wait for our wax, we can help Matthew get out of
Austin and into the bigger, wider world. It’s waiting for him.
--Ryan Masteller
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