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Matchbook Romance.
 If 2005 was the year that emo took a hold on the alternative music scene and everyone started taking the piss out of it, then 2006 will be the year that it reinvents itself and everyone starts to take it seriously. Heavyweights Thursday and Brand New will both release long-awaited new albums later in the year, and both promise an abandonment of the formula that earned them the status of 'long-awaited.' However, we already have a contender for forerunner of the emo revolution: Matchbook Romance. Not many people predicted it, and even drummer Aaron Stern is having a hard time explaining it.
"I can't say exactly why the album came out so dark and so moody," he tells me, speaking of the band's complex and subtle new record 'Voices'. "We just kind of grew up and we have different outlooks on the world now, I guess. We wrote music that inspired us. It could have been all happy songs, if it had inspired us we would have done it. But for some reason these sort of creepier, darker, orchestrated pieces are just kind of what came out.
'Voices' is a very clever record, filled with a creepy ambience, string sections and erratic song structures. Lyrically it's drenched in mystery.
"One of the most intense emotions is when you're freaked out and scared, or you don't know what's going on. We live our lives not knowing a lot of the time what's gonna happen the next day. So I think that fear of the unknown is definitely evoked in this CD."
The band's 2003 debut 'Stories And Alibis' was, for all of its skill, cookie-cutter emo rock. Songs about girls, screamed vocals and double kick drumming underlaid every catchy hook the band could throw at you. 'Voices', however, evokes Muse and Radiohead more easily than The Used or My Chemical Romance. "We know we got shoved into the whole 'screamo' genre with our last album," Stern freely admits.
"We were young then and we didn't know what we were doing as much as we do now... [some bands] are all just screaming and following the right foundations for being a screamo band. We definitely wanted to challenge that. I think this is a career band, and I want to have people want to see what we're gonna do next."
So much for what the band's going to do next; I'm still trying to figure out what exactly the band is doing right now. Each time I listen to the record, it grows, becomes bigger, I hear more. Stern talks about the album casually, giving vague and generalised answers to my questions, which baffles me because of the albums inherent complexity. The whole thing is a mystery to me, and it becomes apparent that Stern doesn't want to give too much of the game away. Even the artwork is haunting: a strange figure clad in a bunny suit tries to hide from a basement full of shadowy monsters. And then there's that piece of plastic which accompanies the sleeve: it's square, has black lines on it, and is the bane of my existence. I've been itching to ask what it means; but Stern remains playfully evasive. "I'll give you a hint: the voices are in the walls," he almost whispers. "There's a lot of internet downloading these days of albums - you can download a band's album or burn it off your friends - so we wanted to create artwork that went along with the CD that you needed to complete the whole experience. We have secrets that are hidden within the CD, with that plastic piece and some other things that are in there, that complete the whole creepy vibe. So go ahead and keep messing with it, I'm sure you'll find it.
"On top of having music we wanted to create this whole sort of experience for people, for people to be immersed, to question things, to use their minds. Every time you listen to the album you'll probably hear something new, something in the background, so it's really kind of cool, it just gets your mind going. People's first listen, they're like 'ah, maybe I don't like it,' but it's definitely an album that grows on you."
That's all well and good, but goddamn; what is that piece of plastic?! I plead with Stern, I almost beg. With a slight chuckle, he concedes. "I'll tell you, but you can't print it." I hastily agree. I hold my breath. "I'll give you another clue, you gotta put that strip..."
Matt Vesely
 | 'Voices' is out now through Shock. |
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