Not since their self-titled 1997 debut have M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel simply assembled a bunch of tracks and called it an album. Since then, the duo has placed concepts first, even while their execution has remained elastic: sometimes their overriding intent dominates a single track; sometimes the connection between a song and the whole is threadlike at best. I'm partial to their last full-length, 2001's A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure, but for some Matmos fans, their masterpiece remains 1999's The West, their least conceptually unified album since that first outing. The West contains guitar and other stringed instruments that, in places, evoke the Sergio Leone "big sky" of the Western landscape, but it also has a fair amount of abstract electronic noise without any particular association. Matmos had something in particular in mind for The West as a whole, but they weren't afraid to follow the tracks where they wanted to go.
The Civil War, Matmos' latest, is cut from a similar cloth as The West, but with a more overt and unified concept. The through line this time is the martial music of war-- specifically the civil wars of America's north and south, and the British civil war of the 17th century. Banjos, tubas, penny whistles, rolling snares, bagpipes-- sounds and textures from these conflicts are embedded in the folk music of the English-speaking world, and on The Civil War, Matmos create from them through sampling, processing, editing and arranging.
As a technical achievement and as a piece of pure sound, The Civil War is inarguably Matmos' best record. Past Matmos albums have tried to create music from stranger sources and the results, while frequently brilliant and often amusing, sometimes lacked the sonic punch to put them over the top. The raw materials here are things like piano, electric guitar, drums, and hurdy gurdy, so naturally this is far and the away the most musical Matmos we've heard. The instrumental palette was beautifully designed, the layering and detail is amazing, and the computer often goes completely undetected-- in places, it really does sound like a credible string band arranged by someone from the 21st Century.
Another parallel between this album and The West lies in its lack of dancefloor accessibility: the loose-limbed funk that wormed its way through A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure is nowhere to be found here. This is, of course, entirely appropriate considering The Civil War's overriding theme. Instead, we get tracks like "Y.T.T.E.", whose drums and bass swing hard, forming a groove that sounds something like a combination of "Bo Diddley" and "You Can't Hurry Love". At nine minutes, it's one of the record's two centerpieces (the other being the equally long "Reconstruction"), featuring Acetone frontman Mark Lightcap's guitar dancing nimbly above the beat. As the percussion splinters and then fades, Lightcap codas with an effective bit of internal Maggot Brain-style soloing.
"For the Trees" slows things down with the kind of behind-the-beat shuffle that's become something of a Matmos trademark, and it works just right against the piano and violin, evoking a sepia-toned portrait of a lazy afternoon in the deep south. The track's closing reprise strips away any trace of electronics and coasts into the horizon on an acoustic cloud. The send-up of "Stars and Stripes Forever", meanwhile, is a sharp statement, skewering the pomposity of John Philip Sousa with dinky sounds and unsteady rhythms while secretly celebrating the spectacle of it all.
I have a feeling that Matmos' concepts serve mostly to constrict the limitless possibilities of sampling and sequencing-- deciding to use a fixed set of sounds necessarily limits choice, which has to feel good when you've mastered the computer and the world is your orchestra. But sound and production aside, something isn't quite there. "Reconstruction", for example, follows a brilliant arc from a messy beginning of electronic squelches, reaches a jaunty middle with marching drums and a snappy guitar riff, then dissolves into a Reichian tremble of dense repeating keyboards before finally coming out the other side with a delicate banjo/steel guitar refrain. The construction of the thing is fantastic, the pacing just right, and yet, when that mournful banjo does its Bud Cort walk into the sunset, I just can't escape the feeling that there's less of an emotional core here than on previous offerings-- that the concept has perhaps taken too much precedence over the visceral delivery. As such, The Civil War, while impossible not to like, is difficult to love.
