Paul Cherry x The Mattson 2

407 Central Ave. NW,Albuquerque NM 87102

03 March, 2023

Description

Paul Cherry Through pining comes purpose. Paul Cherewick, monikered Paul Cherry, makes a departure from pining for an unrequited love on his debut LP Flavour toward the hungerfor creative fulfillment on Back on the Music. “Bouncing off the bottom: this pattern is theproblem...” is the melancholic opening line of the new album, a meandering meditationon the life of an artist: chasing inspiration, finding community, and the struggle tomaintain both. Throughout the buoyant, alright-on-the-outside tracks that make up hissecond album, Cherry staggers and stumbles back into love with his life and craft. Music becomes personified inside Tootsie Roll, becoming an ugly, grinning trench coated villain plucked right out of a vintage Max Fleischer cartoon, cooing to the listener, “You know you want me. Take me, take me,” harmonizing over his own voice. Almost as if through excess, inhibition and precise self-analysis, Paul Cherry may find quiet. In the luxuriant arrangement of the title track, Back on the Music he sings, “You love to play, but it don’t pay. Feels like you’re caught in check mate.” Not everything fits neatly within the lines of these songs, as in the lonely, wobbling flute melody that carries us out of It Happens All the Time. Cherry shows us that often the path back to one’s self—disguised in this album as Music—is a wavering one. The Mattson 2 The Mattson 2’s recent output includes the celebratory, disco-splashed Toro Y Moi single Millennium which appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. The twin brothers cameoed in the joints video as grumpy orderlies in a mental ward high-jacking instruments from Chaz Bear’s bandmates. The 2’s previous release Paradise found them evoking the lush and carefree soundscapes of Japanese city pop. Their 2018 release Vaults of Eternity: Japan is full of loving reinterpretations of songs by artists like Haruomi Hosono and Ryuichi Sakamoto, and while Paradise doesn’t indulge in sonic excess, it does capture that breezy, sun-filled vibe. It charted Billboard at #1 Contemp. Jazz, #2 Jazz, #20 Alternative and landed features in the Washington Post and Pitchfork. Amongst collabs w/ Ray Barbee, ‪Tommy Guerrero,‬ Farmer Dave (of ‪Kurt Vile‬), and ‪‪Money Mark‬ (‬of ‪‪Beastie Boys‬‬)‪, they released Star Stuff in 2017 with ‬Chaz Bear (FKA Chaz Bundick, AKA Toro Y Moi) — also #1 on Billboard contemp. jazz charts — and reinterpreted Coltrane’s legendary A Love Supreme which Ashely Kahn (author of A Love Supreme: The Creation of John Coltrane’s Classic Album, 2002) says “there is a depth of sincerity and reverence in what the Mattson’s are doing that is unquestionable.”