It Takes Two, Baby, It Takes Two

[SeanDMan]

Weapon is fucking badass.

Indeed it is badass.

What you said about Alabama Motel Room being a weird intro to Matt Good, one of the first singles and that, it's actually the first Matt Good song I ever heard, and the one that hooked me on his stuff. It was either you or ApSham that sent me the song, from here. Really good track.

It would have probably been ApSham, I don't introduce people to someone's dark shit right off the bat. It's a good song, just, not exactly a popcorn and tap your foot track.

I'm not going to comment on all the picks because I don't have time but Apparitions is an awesome video. I don't know if I'd be able to pick between that or Strange Days for my favourite video, but Weapon's videois also really awesome.

Strange Days is okay, but not great. Apparitions is great. There's really no contest for me. The chick in the Strange Days video is cute but the hooker in Apparitions is hot which also tips the scales slightly. >_>

The DVD from In A Coma that included all the music videos was actually well worth the purchase alone, since Matt has a talent for making really outstanding videos as well as songs.

Yeah, I just busted out the package and I think I got my money's worth on the bunny photos alone.

The commentary track is great too, Matt completely forgetting about Rico's video was hilarious.

The best part is him laughing for a minute at the end of Carmelina cause he forgot about his chocolate bar.

[SeanDMan]

White Light Rock And Roll Review - Matthew Good

This was a very exciting time for fans of Matthew Good. During the break between Avalanche and White Light, Good was extremely active online; his MBlog was a go to bookmark for a long time for me (I even had it linked in my sig for a while at EWB) as a source for entertainment commentary, political discussion and, of course, new art. He'd post primarily prose, occasional poems, and reposts of old stories from his published collection of manifestos, At Last There Is Nothing Left To Say (including my personal favourite, The Magic Goats Of Presto Island). Everything seemed to be building to a fever pitch as I set about off for another summer of work, with Alert Status Red just starting to airplay as I headed off.

Then the record dropped. And it was... well, the reviews were mixed. Some people considered it a rotten egg, some considered it a misdirected protest record, some considered it an on target, biting critique of the current way of the world. This album is probably why I did Radiohead first; cause I really didn't like this album when it dropped. There were bright spots for sure, but some of it was just really not that good (North American For Life, the second single, being a good example). I'm also not a HUGE fan of Country Matt Good, although some of the stuff plays really well on his live acoustic shows, some of it just takes the album in strange directions that aren't entirely comfortable.

Not like Paris Hilton's vagina, anyway.

Alert Status Red

So this is probably one of the better protest songs on an underwhelming protest record. The reason I like it is the lyrics; lines like "Which came first, the bad idea or me befallen by not giving a shit?" and "a will for learning, these books were made for burning" and "the only place to find freedom is in the dictionary, under f" always get a smile out of me. He's not at his height of the earlier, more subliminal and more hillarious sarcastic lyric writing he did before (compare this song, for example, to

for an example of how this record is just a step behind his earlier stuff), but really, Matt Good above par is still Matt Good on the golf course. You know he's going to be back sub zero next round.

As an aside, this video got Matt in a lot of heat because of included footage taken from the Columbine Shootings spliced into the music video. He didn't shoot the video, direct it, or direct the editting, and he hadn't noticed the footage because of how it was spliced in and how short it is. However, after mulling it over (and probably talking to an attorney) he said, "We are members of a violent society. We sell the world the majority of its weaponry; we are the foremost purveyors of nuclear weapons, chemical and biological weapons, and military hardware. And yet we love nothing more than to point the finger at others and claim that they are the cause of the world's love affair with violence". He then put the video back up and stood by it's message and his director.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-zidjWGGqk

Blue Skies Over Badlands

Scumbag SDM: Says he doesn't like Country Matt Good, picks this song as one of his favourites of the record. Yeah, I know, but really, he could have played the instrument track on a piano, or a drum kit, or by recording him stabbing a watermelon with a meat cleaver for all the difference it would have made. Don't get me wrong, the sparse guitar is great, but it's the lyrics that make this song what it is.

This is probably the most direct anti-war song he's done, and it doesn't mince words. It asks directly, "What did these kids ever do to you? What is the difference between you and them? Why are you killing them?" Too many people can analyze the conflicts across the world and point to the various differences and reasons and ancient grievances but no one has ever stood up and said "Hey, I'm a man, you're a man. We're brothers. Fuck everything else, let's live as brothers". The problem is never that simple, but, it should be. We're all in this together, guys, and the more we fuck up this planet and it's people, the more we all lose.

[SeanDMan]

In A Coma, Disc One - Matthew Good

So the mixed reviews of White Light Rock And Roll Review combined with the fact that Matt's deal with the record label was up led to them to begin pressuring him to do a Greatest Hits record while they still had complete control of his music. Matt had turned them down on this request several times but, seeing daylight at the end of his record deal, decided that it might be worth it to quickly get this record out of the way in order to move on, free and clear, unburdened by the record companies demands and free to do whatever he wanted.

However, Good decided early on that the idea of a greatest hits album was something he didn't like; he felt like as an artist it was his job to make every new record a greatest hits album, and that if he just rested on what came before, he was doing a disservice to the people who paid money to see him and hear him play. As such, four new tracks were recorded for In A Coma, and they all ended up on Disc One. Picking two songs out of four is pretty easy. Disc two is more of a pain in the ass, but let's get disc one out of the way first.

Oh Be Joyful

This is the greatest music video in the history of music videos.

This is why MTV exists.

I heard that when he watched this video, Michael Jackson was incredibly sad that he didn't just film this for his Thriller song.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tl2zHlayxwg

Big City Life

This song is pretty straight forward, and has some really cool riffs towards the back half. I like how it is essentially two songs; a relaxed, slow paced verse, then the more frenetic chorus. The bridge in the middle is also a really solid riff. I remember hearing this song through the aforementioned MBlog as a demo and thinking "Wow, the lyrics are cool, but the backing track is naff". The finished version is much more solid.

We're not at Hospital Music yet, but I should note; a lot of the songs Matt writes are very personal and deal with concepts of loneliness, isolation, and alienation. He's probably one of the more outspoken critics of how this province and country diagnoses and treats mental illness. So tracks like this, about someone "chasing the dragon" so to speak to their ultimate demise, are nothing new, and par for the course (more golf analogies! Yay!) for Matt records. This song it's as dark as some of his earlier stuff, but it's still very raw, lyrically.

[SeanDMan]

In A Coma, Disc Two - Matthew Good

In an attempt to avoid a greatest hits record feel, Matt also wanted to include a disc worth of material most people had never heard. So he started by recording 9 songs, some of them singles and some of them b-sides, from previous records in a stripped down, Matt and a guitar/Matt and a piano sort of version. Once that was done, he looked back over his catalog and picked two sparsely released EPs and jammed them in there too. Once that was done, he filled up the remnants of a third disc with his own personal favourites, with 1 single and 4 b-sides that he particularly liked. As such, a vast majority of this material was new, even to people who owned all his singles already.

The two EPs released here were Loser Anthems and Lo-Fi B-Sides. Lo-Fi B-Sides is okay, and features an interesting cover of Enjoy The Silence, but man, Loser Anthems. This entire disc alone is worth buying the compilation. It's a 7 track disc (although 1 track is him trying to play someone elses' song, and concluding that they aren't human and must instead be a team of midgets in order to play that piano piece)and really, 5 of the tracks are solid gold. Probably the most well known, Fine Art Of Falling Apart, is the one I'd pass on, but the rest of it is awesome. I can only pick two though, so I whittled it down.

Flashdance II

What to say about this song? I love it, absolutely love it. It's really pretty straightforward, lyrically, but lyrically it's amazing. I mean, the first words of the chorus are "Barely living but we're living large". How well does that describe you, Mr. HDTV and PS3 but no money for groceries? The suggestion that an ideal date would be "Let's go downtown and wait until until it feels like the walls are caving in" is really something that speaks to me, as an agorophobe. Then there's "her hate is still prettier in person" and I swear at times Matt wrote this song for me.

Yeah, this song is awesome. Great lyrics, great guitar, randomly interspersed piano bridge, the entire thing is glorious. Matt can sing of isolation like no other, and he has so many tracks that just find the soft underside of your heart and stab right in. Can never hit skip on this song, I always listen to it all the way through, and usually, several times back to back. Just a really great all around track.

The Man From Harold Wood

Then there's this song. Honestly, I fought very hard internally whether it would be this song or whether it might be

or

but eventually I just had to go with this song, despite it being a simple, short instrumental.

Nah, actually, fuck that, the reason I went with it is because it's a simple, short instrumental. There's nothing wrong with instrumental music; it's just as capable of making you feel something as is music with words. In this case, I love this track because it makes it seem like something amazing is about to happen. It's quiet, it's a soft, guided tour around an empty arena; but then there's the crowd, they're excited, raring to go, then back to empty, back to wandering... this song paints a visual in my head of a grand venue about to erupt and if you can do that with just a piano, backing synth, and a small sample of crowd noise, then who the fuck needs words.

[SeanDMan]

Hospital Music - Matthew Good

So between this disc and the next one, a lot happened. Matt's contract with Atlantic expired, meaning he was free and clear to do whatever he wanted. What he wanted to do was write a book; he was tired of music, and just wanted to take some time and write, and maybe if songs came to him songs would come to him, but he wanted time in front of a fire instead of time in front of a microphone. He was going through a divorce, which was reportedly pretty ugly. So when he landed in England, things got even worse. He panicked, and cut short his vacation. When he got back home, things didn't get better, so he moved in with his folks for a while. One day, they found him collapsed in the shower, shivering and shaking, overdosed on pills.

That's essentially how Hospital Music happened; a man, struggling his entire life with mental illness, hits the absolute bottom, has himself committed, sits through the bullshit tests and jumps through enough hoops to finally figure out what's wrong with him, and then sets about rebuilding his life. He was a man with a diagnosis, but not much else; he was a singer without a record deal. You can't just make records and release them without a label.

Well, yeah, you can. A couple of guys from iTunes decided they wanted to see how far they could take an unheralded and obscure Canadian musician without a record deal, and the result was pretty positive to say the least. As for the music, well, it's a mixed bag, some of it is a little too personal and emotional to really recommend (such as I'm Not Safer Than A Bank) but I've always been a fan of an artist baring his bleeding heart all over his sleeve, so I really enjoyed it.

Champions Of Nothing

First of all, I apologize, no one has uploaded the full 9 minute version from this album, the closest I could come was this live recording from the following live album. This song has a bit of everything in it. The lyrics are great and very poignant, the guitar solos are awesome, the change of pace and intonation in the vocals are really well done. The entire song basically builds up to it's frantic conclusion, and by the end of it, Good is basically strangling his microphone and screaming at you, and it all just feels so raw and alive, it really is one of his most deeply personal while at the same time well constructed and enjoyable songs.

And if you thought this record would be light hearted, the final verse lyric "the end of my rope there's a new world that's glowing" pretty much would have erased that. This is a man in pain, and soothing his soul through music. It's not all this dark, but you better strap in, because it's going to get worse before it gets better.

I'm A Window

"Don't fuck the princess, do the maid" always makes me smile.

So this song is basically in several parts; first of all, it's an anthem for people who feel alone, isolated, outcasts. It's a song that says "No, fuck that, you're awesome, go kick ass. Stop being afraid of what might happen, just make it happen and deal with it from there". You don't have to be afraid to be who you are; you can just go out there and be yourself. If people love you, great. If people don't, well fuck them.

Secondly, there's the backing bridges about the "gone away boys". We'll probably get more into this in the next record but Matt has always been an advocate for the poor and the downtrodden, and if his experiences in a psych ward were anything like mine, he probably met people there who lived on the margins. So the song always says that hey, people are people. We all have the same issues, some of us have it better in some areas, some of it worse. I won't judge you, you don't judge me, let's all just be ourselves and be comfortable being ourselves.

Also, fuck the maid.

[SeanDMan]

Vancouver - Matthew Good

After Hospital Music, Matt did a bunch of live stuff; two tours, and some big shows, one Concert Night Live On Bravo, and a live album he recorded at Massey Hall. I don't consider live albums the same as a fresh release especially given that none of the music there was new. The two youtube links I used for Hospital Music were taken from the Massey Hall disc anyway so in a way I already covered that one. >_>

So we move on to Vancouver, the 2009 Matthew Good album that is pretty much what it says on the box. If you don't know, I'm a Vancouver boy myself, so a lot of the themes, theories, and lyrics on this disc hit pretty close to home. This album was Matt's last recorded while living in Vancouver; he moved out to the eastern farm suburbs afterwards, feeling like the big city that had been his home had become stifling and that he needed air. On that subject as well, I can definitely relate.

The Boy Who Could Explode

As usual, this disc was hard to pick two favourite tracks off. As is normal, one track is an absolute must to include, then a bunch of tracks fall just behind it in terms of how good they are. A glut of good songs is a nice problem to have though, but it makes paring down a record to two tracks something of a pain in the ass. This was the second track I picked, and there's probably 5 other tracks that I could have gone with (so 8 solid tracks on a 10 track disc). In the end, I picked this one, probably on the basis of the lyrics.

This song has some great lyrics in it, from "an equal ride for the sheep that reign" to "this musical ride, these sheets of rain", Matt definitely knows this town. The overall message of the song is that the way we've allowed this place to develop (or, rather, to stagnate and rot) is unacceptable, and we should have wiped it out and started over long ago. But there is a political reservation against steps forward; Vancouver is home of a ton of people who love to shout "NOT IN MY BACKYARD!" if someone wants to do something progressive, so instead of fixing our failing infrastructure, all we get are studies, back and forth lawsuits, and a whole lot of nothing. The message is, basically, to stop waiting and start actually fucking doing shit. A message that, sadly, is lost on most people in this city.

Last Parade

Songs from this album started leaking to the net in 2007; given that it was a 2009 release, that in and of itself is notable, but more notable is that Matt was leaking all the songs himself. He'd record a demo version himself, then leak it either through his website or through various more covert means. The feedback he'd get allowed him the chance to tweak either the lyrics, the vocal style, the tempo, or the instrumentation (that changed the most; the album versions all sound a lot clearer with professionally recorded instruments). Probably no song benefited more than this one. The instrumentation is much crisper and sharper and just sounds so much better.

From first listen however, this song was always going to be the best on the album; the lyrics are a scathing critique of the wasteful spending this city took on their shoulders (several billions of debt) when we are in a budgeting crisis to fund our social programs already. Yeah, we had The Olympics, and it was fun for a few drunken weeks, but this city has serious problems that we swept under the rug, and now we can't pay for them because of the legacy of debt left. This song asks the question; what's the point of organizing a grand parade if it's going to be the last parade you can ever have?

[SeanDMan]

The Fat Of The Land - Prodigy

So I said I'd do Pink Floyd next, but I feel like I need more time to put that together since I was having a real tough time picking favourites off the discs I have. I do have another band who I have a small sampling of albums from without owning their entire discography, though, and they're also an experimental British act who I got really into during the nineties! So let's pretend that these next couple are Pink Floyd albums. >_>

Nah, I am of course talking about Prodigy, a band who really helped introduce me to electronic music, sampling, mixing, remixing and redubbing and all those wonderful things that come with that style of music. Classifying Prodigy themselves into a genre is pretty pointless because they tend to wander from dance to house to trance to funk to rock to whatever the fuck they feel like doing that day, and that's one of the things I've always enjoyed; even if that's led to let downs where I heard a song and thought "well that was kind of naff", at least it was fucking different. Their ever expanding repertoire of styles and songs is a great first step to anyone looking to get into electronic music, or just broaden their musical horizons in general.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BpfydZdTE0

Smack My Bitch Up

I wager I'm probably not alone in this being my introduction to Prodigy. It was Yoshihiro Tajiri actually who introduced me to this song; we were having Chai Tea in a Seoul maid cafe when he handed me his walkman and told me "no question, just listen". The song was a revelation; I almost immediately went on a mad downloading spree and got as much of this strange Prodigy as I could. As most people who did something similar might be aware, there is an American rapper known as The Prodigy, which made downloading actual Prodigy a nightmare of confusion and mislabeling.

When I got a little older and I had some spare cash kicking around, I picked this album up. It was in the bargain bin by then (actually I also bought it at a record store that was going under, so I think I paid a fiver for it) and brought it home, and it was a definitely mixed bag. This track was a great introduction to the singles Prodigy would later become famous for; tracks like

and

have a similar, aggressive, bass backed beat to them that helped them appeal to disenfranchised youth. Great songs to work out to also, really keep the adrenaline up. Some of them make good BGM for boning also.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVFsW18obWc

Climbatize

Although most of the singles are great, this is undoubtedly my favourite track on the album. I've mentioned before my affinity for brass in modern music and while this is sampled horn, it's still horn damnit. This song is really great at mood and level management in that it builds in pace, intensity, and complexity, then drops out and is basically just naked horn. These series of peaks and valleys is really electronic music 101; good electronic music should be like tantric sex, building, ebbing, building, ebbing, so that when you finally finish, you just want a sandwich and a cigar.

Reading the wiki page for this song is fun too.

[06:24] SDM: The main drum loop was sampled from "Air Drums from Outer Bongolia" by English electronic duo the Jedi Knights; Liam Howlett sampled the drums without the group's permission, and the Jedi Knights threatened to sue the Prodigy. However, Howlett recognized that the Jedi Knights themselves had sampled the drums from an older track entitled "Bongolia" by American funk group Incredible Bongo Band without permission; XL Recordings, the Prodigy's record label, bought the rights to the Incredible Bongo Band track and threatened to sue the Jedi Knights; the media coverage cornered around the event attracted film producer George Lucas, who sued the Jedi Knights for taking their stage name from the Star Wars term "Jedi Knight", which Lucas created.

[06:24] SDM: Bwahaha.

[06:24] SDM: This is why lawyers make so much money.

[06:24] TEOL:

[06:24] TEOL: It's a hard argument to dispute.

Prodigy: hard to dispute. Hard as fuck. Deal with it.

[Kaney]

Is Lights of An Endangered Species too recent a release to have formed a full opinion about? Vancouver is probably one of my favourite Matt Good albums to listen to as a whole, I think I spoke about it before when it was released how much I preferred it to Hospital Music, but it's all good. I'd have picked Empty's Theme Park as my favourite from the album, but I'm more disconnected from the subject matter than you so you'd get the lyrics and meaning a lot more than I would.

Prodigy are a band I've never gotten into. Stuff like Firestarter or Smack My Bitch Up are things I'd never go out of my way to listen to but if I do hear it by chance it ends up stuck in my head all day. I don't know if it's a bad thing.

[SeanDMan]

Is Lights of An Endangered Species too recent a release to have formed a full opinion about?

I'm only doing albums I own, and I haven't had a chance to pick up Lights yet. I already know it's worth a buy because the songs he's streamed on his Soundcloud (In A Place Of Lesser Men, Non Populous, and Zero Orchestra) are all awesome.

I'm going to see him in concert in December, I will probably pick it up at the show.

Vancouver is probably one of my favourite Matt Good albums to listen to as a whole, I think I spoke about it before when it was released how much I preferred it to Hospital Music, but it's all good.

It's hard for me to pick a favourite between the two of them, but I know Avalanche is probably still overall my favourite Matt Good album.

I'd have picked Empty's Theme Park as my favourite from the album, but I'm more disconnected from the subject matter than you so you'd get the lyrics and meaning a lot more than I would.

Empty's Theme Park is good, but I admit I haven't listened to it as much since it's so late in the album; I almost always end up getting stuck with one of the earlier tracks on repeat and never make it to the end. I stand by my choices though.

Prodigy are a band I've never gotten into.

Prodigy are a band you don't ever have to get into, but you're still going to wind up nodding your head to just because their music ends up absolutely everywhere, from movies to TV to games to ads... pretty much every action movie of the late 90s had a Prodigy track in it somewhere.

Stuff like Firestarter or Smack My Bitch Up are things I'd never go out of my way to listen to but if I do hear it by chance it ends up stuck in my head all day. I don't know if it's a bad thing.

They're the singles, so they're meant to be catchy. Usually the best of the albums tend not to be singles though, so it might be worth picking up a disc (especially since they're so cheap nowadays) and give it a whirl. Might enjoy it.