Every morning, Detroit tech-house artist Matthew Dear has to wake up to the painful realization that, for the rest of his career, he might never again release anything as good as "Dog Days". This is hardly a slight to Dear-- "Dog Days" just happens to be one of the most irresistible house numbers to come out in years, and the song casts a long, pitch-black shadow over the rest of his work. Even Dear's 2003 solid debut LP, Leave Luck to Heaven, which tried to keep "Dog Days" tucked away until the sixth track, ultimately suffered from this emergent disparity.
Dear definitely feels the pressure. After Leave Luck to Heaven, he tried his best to match the hook and energy of "Dog Days" with the feisty 12-inch single "Anger Management". The fractured acid-house groove had just as much energy as "Dog Days", but lacked Dear's breathy vocal hook, relying instead on the warmth of the synth sounds themselves. B-side "Future Never Again" fared similarly with gorgeous high- and low-end production, and from the release, it seemed that Dear had decided to forgo the "Dog Days" formula entirely and instead to concentrate on this very exciting warm acid-house approach. Dear's abrasive debut Kisses EP as Audion only fortified this expectation, the 12-inch bearing the faint hint of a denser, club-friendlier Pan Sonic.
Given this trajectory, Dear's new Backstroke LP comes with two surprises: For one, Dear relies much more heavily on his vocals to carry the songs than before-- more than half of these tracks prominently feature his vocals. What consciously results are Dear's first pop songs, most of which make recourse to traditional verse/chorus/verse structure. The other surprise is more frustrating: Dear's instrumental tracks are remarkably flat. They hardly match the energy of "Anger Management" or Kisses, let alone Dear's fantastic earlier EPs. What's worse, since the instrumentals come between the vocal tracks, an otherwise exciting Backstroke suffers from some serious drag.
The torrent of noise that delays opener "Another" for over a minute finally gives way to a pulse of timid synth straight out of Warp's back catalog. Dear updates the line halfway through with a bubbly glitch treatment, but given the line's fragility, he can't do much else with it, and the song stagnates. Dear himself must have realized this about "Another"; in fact, the vinyl release of Backstroke pulls it from the tracklist altogether.
Percussion sounds on "Tide" fire off and recoil while Dear snakes a simple but gargantuan bassline and some twitchy guitar action into the mix. By the time Dear enters in verse with modest reverb, the song's chorus is about to take over: The guitar drops out, and Dear's catchy nanny-nanny boo-boo potshot ("I don't care 'bout you anymore") is closely followed by a trail of deadened vocals, used to bewilderingly great effect.
Unfortunately, what life "Tide" manages to breathe into Backstroke is enervated by "Takes on You", a seven-minute instrumental that boasts the precision of Kompakt but none of its heart. Dear won't reclaim the listener's rapt attention until "Grut Wall". Here, Dear contrasts trench-deep but well-defined low-end with bright clicks, while a tired bee-like buzz flutters between the two. Shortly thereafter, the song's colorful electric piano melody-- perhaps a sinister counterpart to Jurgen Pääpe's line on "So Weit Wie Noch Wie"-- settles in for good. "Grut Wall" would have killed even as an instrumental, but Dear's exorcised vocals send it rocketing up to meet "Tide" as an album highlight.
After "Grut Wall", Backstroke becomes particularly disappointing. "I Know Howser" is Dear's lazy attempt at schaffel-pop; the possibly tongue-in-cheek "Huggy's Parade" is an undeveloped, infantile "Dog Days" rehash; and there's not much to say about "Good Girl" other than that it's just fucking terrible. Thankfully, the album's epic closer, "And in the Night", redeems some of the album's second-side sins. Though definitely out of place on Backstroke-- it sounds more like an overloaded Happy Mondays than the minimal house approach to which Dear primarily subscribes-- its storm of horns, keyboards, bell sounds, and tape hiss work quite well behind Dear's multitracked vocal melodies.
It's unclear if "And in the Night" marks a new direction for Dear or just a fluke, but it stands as one last reminder here of how much Dear is capable as an artist. In this sense, Backstroke could become even more of a burden to Dear: The album makes it strikingly clear when he's dead on, and when he's miles off.
