Matt Finucane – This Mucky Age
It’s an annoying way to review but there will be lots of ‘sounds like’
in this piece. Not so much musically but vocally Matt has been cursed/blessed with an instantly comfortable tone that brings to mind many great singers to me!
‘Harder To Care’ gets us off to a Lo-fi, low voice, low key start. Maybe Matt Johnson of The The . Hands Up keeps my no- one has done a bad list song (think ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’) theory above water. ‘Hands Up who believes in trophy shags, hands up for rotten teeth and rickets.’ A slightly off-kilter chug that points us all out as beasts of the field, it has some killer early 80s compressed post rock guitar as found on A Certain Ratio tracks. The vocals become compressed and it collapses into a slavering heap. A stand-out and obvious single.
By track 3 I’m thinking he sounds like Bowie (quite possibly an accident of birth) he also sounds like the acoustic guitar on early Ronno Bowie. The most obvious Bowie link is the ‘outsider’ lyric to ‘Grimm’. ‘Wet Dream Disaster’ probably gets my best track nod, a skank with the mark of Bowie, like Iggy’s ‘Nightclubbing’. It seems to roll into church in the middle for a fiddle with the organ. At the end Matt becomes a priapic Travis Bickle begging for rain that sounds like it will bing on the ‘sex face’ mentioned earlier in the song. You’ll all be chanting “show us your sex face” after hearing this.
Although the lazy comparison for Matt’s voice has been Bowie, when he croons which he often does he sounds more like a the Lounge Lizard Bowie, that is Richard Butler from The Psychedelic Furs . On ‘Undertow’ the smoky boulevardier is to the fore, with something of Peter Hammill for good measure.
If I must criticise I find it a little one paced – ‘Hands Up’ really shows what he can do to cover more bases and be a little more accessible. When on that form he could come up with something as vibrant as Simon Warner on the lost gem ‘Waiting Rooms’.
This album is a late night trawl through the streets wishing you were ‘in’. With the in crowd, demand or just a chance.