I’m pretty much a complete sucker for distorted guitars deployed in waves of beautiful warm ooze. The old shoegazer in me has trouble turning on critical faculties when faced with the well textured peacefulness that is at the centre of the maelstrom. And so my immediate response to my first hearing of Matt Bartram was very positive. He knows how to wield his effects pedals. I remember reading an interview of Andy Bell and Mark Gardener of Ride fame many years ago. They said that experience had taught them that layers and layers of guitar in recordings meant that each one had to be turned down, diminishing their impact. So they generally stuck to one guitar track each within which they explored all the fuzz, wah and reverb they could muster to full impact. Matt Bartram goes by this same philosophy. Rarely do more than two guitar lines feature, giving each the space to breathe and buzz, creating wonderful soundscapes.
The problem with Left To Memory, however, is all the other bits that go into making music and songs. Bartram leaves all the rhythms at program-by-numbers drum machine. By neither using live drums, nor letting the drum machine be a drum machine, but to merely deploy it as a bland, plodding imitator of live drums, he abandons the chance to have what is best about either. Likewise, vocals are all fey indie musings pushed through a long tailed reverb preset, offering nothing in light and shade, just a sub-Jesus and Mary Chain nothingness. These things completely undermine the exquisiteness of the guitar textures, which have obviously been intricately crafted.
The best moments of Left To Memory, then, are those where everything is pretty much turned off apart from the guitars. And there are a few of these – the two interludes ‘Vision Pt 1′ and ‘Vision Pt 2′ in particular, or ‘Twelve String Loop’, the real highlight, which demonstrate Bartram’s strengths without diminishing them via the parts of the process for which he doesn’t possess the same passions. At other times, I sometimes find myself beginning to be blissfully lost in the haze, only to be snapped back to the mundane by an annoying ride cymbal preset or a slightly off-key non-melody that echoes off into the canyons seemingly forever. What could have been…
Adrian Elmer
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