M.T. Bearington is odd. Let's just get that out in the open from the start. It's not your typical rock music. It's not even your typical music.
Love Buttons (2011) has got the typical guitars and drums, but it's also got horns, handclaps, a lot of random-seeming sounds and people just talking. You can tell there's a definite interest in sounding a little bizarre, even if (or perhaps because) they're singing about something everybody knows something about: Love.
If you liked any of Matt Thomas' other New Haven music ventures " Leaves of Lothlorien, Weigh Down, and Orange Forest, to name a few " or if you're a fan of folks like Adam Young of Owl City or Bob Dylan in 1967 making music from the privacy of their basements and bedrooms, then you could very well enjoy the moody grooves of M.T. Bearington.
Matt Thomas in his first album A Cloak of Nouns and Loss started M.T. Bearington all by himself. But now having spent a few years touring with friends, he's made it more into a band.
And so here, in a lush blend of folk, rock, and psychedelia, M.T. Bearington brings together not only band members but an album of love songs fittingly introduced in the middle of February.
If you haven't already heard Love Buttons , you should. Earlier this month, M.T. Bearington performed live at the Register Sessions Studio. (Free still to listen to here . It's full of wild tales of crazy loves, thereby giving us a new angle on an age-old theme.
"Dark Night," Matt Thomas says, is "about a guy keeping a girl tied in his basement. Basically, a very twisted love song from the antagonist's perspective. He really loves her and desperately needs her to love him in return." ( Spinner ) So the theme is strange, but the steady drumbeat and choral echoing "Let me go / let me go / let me go" makes it catchy. And, listening, you find you're boogie-woogie-ing in your chair in spite of yourself.
The falsetto opening to "Vanilla" evokes something of Queen or the Beach Boys. But then they're singing "ah, banana" and being "naked from the waist down" and "you make feel so funny" " with electric guitars and an atmospheric chanting making the music glow " and you don't know what to say, but you like it. Again, despite eccentricity, the music gets in your head.
Elsewhere in the album, "The Pictures" sounds horny and balladic. "Bed Gnome" moves from a rollicking, fun Jonathan-Richman-esque opener to a soft-sweet lullaby to a kiddish, squeaky cheer, as a bed gnome croons about loving his bed fellow. And in "When We Climb," a shy but self-confident speaker sings of preferring the ground to the playful heights his lover ascends to.
With Love Buttons , M.T. Bearington puts its finger on an unsettling truth: Love itself is an oddity. Deep down, we never quite know what we love or how. And Matt Thomas " with his melancholic voice, addicting beats, and innovative mind " isn't afraid to admit it.
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