(DREAM DRIVE RECORDS/KOBALT MUSIC EP; 2014)
Pop music that has been influenced by film music, I’m a sucker for. Pop music created by an artist who sounds lost in their private musings, I’m a sucker for. Pop music that drifts and floats and nearly evaporates while you’re listening to it because it is less concerned with structure and what an audience might think than in the personal components of the sound, even if that sound could be sleep-inducing, I’m a sucker for. All this describes something that shouldn’t even be called “pop music,” you say? Well, probably. But, Matteah Baim was in a New York band called Metallic Falcons and played a Bridge School benefit for Neil Young once, and knows people like Devandra Barnhart, Sharon van Etten, Vashti Bunyan and Jim Jarmusch. So she isn’t that obscure, and her music has been reviewed by sites that cover pop music. Maybe we should call her new EP, FALLING THEATER, something like “chamber pop,” or art folk instead. I don’t know. Genre identity is a real pisser these days. But this is gorgeous music and you should check it out if, like me, you spend a lot of time staring out your window, waiting for something interesting to pop up on your laptop, and wishing the world was somehow different.
Somehow Baim’s melancholic arrangements and soft lyrical utterances here DO evoke a sense of waiting, a sense of yearning for something that maybe can’t be fully articulated. Not all the lyrics are in the foreground, but it doesn’t matter, there are violins that come up to prickle your skin, chord progressions that are the kind that only real musicians use, and a real economic sense of getting the evocative job done quickly. I ended up listening to this disc several times in a row, finding memorable sonic details in lovely compositions like “All Night,” “Old Song” and the cinematically stirring “Peach Tree,” with its haunting strings. Baim sounds like some other female singers I’ve heard, but no one specific that comes to mind. The vague introspection of this music reminded me of Neil Halstead’s Mojave 3 project, but it’s not really an easy sound to find references for. It’s delicate, misty and a bit withdrawn. But Baim CARES, or this music wouldn’t be so thoroughly successful at evoking a mood.
By the time the short, pretty songs “Dude” and “Familiar Way” give way to the five-minute neo-ambient “Blindman’s Hand,” whose reverberating vocals and shimmering soundscape didn’t HAVE to be so surprisingly entrancing ’cause I was already hooked, well, I just realized once again that there’s an awful lot of good music out there that is just too obscure to be found by most listeners. But Matteah Baim is something special, something just right for off-center days when you don’t really know quite who you are and what you’re doing, just that you FEEL something. “Evasive reality” oughta be a touchstone kinda mood, and Baim’s FALLING THEATER does a fine job of soundtracking that. I didn’t rise from my chair once through multiple listens to this little gem, and I’m actually eager to hear it again. I can promise you, that is NOT the norm for me.