This long unavailable album marks an important step in the development of Drew Daniel and MC Schmidt's music in that it is the first themed album of many in their career, which is one of the defining features that makes Matmos so interesting. Anyone can try and be clever with quirky samples but with The West, Matmos rose above using novelty sounds just for the sake of them. At this point they became an intellectually challenging but still musically compelling entity.
The idea of the American West is as strong an inspiration and mythology as you can get (especially so in these last few years when the western movie has made such a revival). Many artists have taken on the aesthetic of the campfire song or the Morricone-esque desert soundscape; The Residents did a masterful rendition of old cowboy songs during their Cube-E period; and more recently Earth have reinvented themselves as some kind of doomy country band. Matmos, no strangers to themed releases, undertook a similar task around ten years ago. However, it is not immediately obvious from just listening to the music that they are doing an album influences by country music.
The opening piece, “Last Delicious Cigarette,” wanders around in what sounds like a normal mode of working for Daniel and Schmidt but far from anyone else’s idea of what the West should sound like; A jerky dance beat of squeaky electronic sounds and a pulsing bass synth rhythm. Then it hits; five minutes in and a dizzy violin sound takes over from the electronic blips and whirrs. Immediately a tension is present that is utterly familiar: There is a good guy and a bad guy, the one with the fastest draw wins. Matmos turns the table yet again and rather than end with a bang, the track fizzles out instead. From here on in, The West lives up to its title.
The music shifts from campfire acoustic strumming to banging electronic jams. On the title track, a fantastic electronic beat suddenly drops into a quiet, slow slide guitar passage. It should be a jarring shift but it works brilliantly. Rhythms and moods traditionally associated with men in big hats riding horses are co-opted by Daniel and Schmidt and turned into that quirky dance-come –concrète style that they alone seem capable of pulling off. From reading the sleeve notes, even the most musical parts of The West seem not to have been planned. Much of the instrumentation was recorded as repayment for bunking at Chateau Matmos for use by the pair at a later date. The playing of their house guests was supplemented by David Pajo, who mailed plenty of fantastic guitar playing to the duo. His guitar frequently sounds like it was taken straight from some classic cowboy movie and provides a solid stylistic base for the album.
The West is a bona fida classic and it is criminal that it has been unavailable for so long. Now that the situation has been redressed, I can only hope that the earlier singles/EPs will be collected and thus get most of the early Matmos recordings back in print (and it would be nice to hear the shelved People Like Us collaboration that was due to come out before the PLU/Matmos live album). In the meantime, I am going to be playing the hell out of this album and making up for lost time.
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