Matmos has made a career-long game of devising increasingly outre frameworks for its records. Half the fun of any new Matmos album, in fact, is in discovering its motivational concept: examination of the sounds of an operating table, for example, or the folk music of the Civil War. And yet the conceit for The Marriage of True Minds, their ninth full-length, just might top them all; if its hypothesis were true, you would hardly need this review to tell you what to expect of it, because you would already know.
Briefly: The members of Matmos, Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt, conducted parapsychological experiments on a series of test subjects that sound oddly similar to those from the opening scene of Ghostbusters: They attempted to telepathically communicate their intentions for this record to their subjects, who then reported any images or sounds they thought they received. Their input is woven inventively throughout True Minds; On "In Search of a Lost Faculty", you can hear these participants struggling to describe visions of triangles (a startling number of them report having received images of triangles, actually) while Daniel and Schmidt surround them with ringing chimes. The concept seems designed for ethereal, mystical music, but Matmos doesn't really do ethereal or mystical: The Marriage of True Minds hits harder and feels more joyfully physical than anything Matmos has done in years.
Daniel and Schmidt sometimes give off the impression that they are eggheads, forensic scientists of sound, but Matmos' music, at its best, has always been fun, and The Marriage of True Minds is no exception. With some judicious excisions of its scary and disturbing parts, most of it would make an excellent soundtrack for a kindergarten classroom. "Very Large Green Triangles" starts out with some heavy, irregular stomping, transitions into some four-on-the-floor pummeling, and then lurches to an abrupt halt as if signaled by a cartoon traffic cop's hand. "Mental Radio", with its sploshing puddle sounds and clattering layers of percussion, sounds like a conga line sent across across a wet, dirty subway platform. "Ross Transcript" opens with the sound of a radio flitting between stations, landing briefly on a syrupy bit of Muzak before plowing forward, cycling through a menagerie of funny sounds, including baaing sheep and babbling, indignant chatter seemingly recorded on the planet Tatooine.
There are still occasional bursts of discomfort-- Daniel and Schmidt have cast-iron stomach for cringe-inducing sounds, and it wouldn't be a Matmos album if you didn't occasionally wince. The dry, squeaky violin that briefly saws away on "You" hits the ear like a dentist scraper touching an exposed nerve ending. "Ross Transcript", in addition to the funny noises described above, also samples a bit of what sounds a lot like choking and spluttering. Their music has always had an antic, morbid cast to it, like a Grimm's fairy tale with all the ghoulish aspects slightly accentuated, and The Marriage of True Minds is maybe the most confident they've ever been at balancing the two sides of this equation.
There are many songs on this album, for instance, that you could actually dance to, rather than just think about doing so. The stomping, crunching, tactile feast of itching guitars, hand claps, and zooming interstellar synths that is "Tunnel", for instance, is an NYC no-wave disco done as a splatter painting. "E.S.P." starts out with a parodic, goofy recitation of the lyrics to the Buzzcocks' song "E.S.P." in growling, black-metal style. Then, after thrashing through some doomy down-tuned metal guitars, it lifts off into a fizzy, joyful coda, a hootenanny swarmed by genetically engineered fireflies. I didn't make the connection to the Buzzcocks song until the fourth or fifth listen, as I was too absorbed in the music itself. The best compliment you can pay Matmos' music, then and now, remains that in the moment, it didn't matter to me in the slightest.
