Music, Record Reviews

New Record: Matthew Dear, Asa Breed

Posted by: detourmag on June 20, 2007 at 8:00 am

matthewdear.jpg
MATTHEW DEAR, Asa Breed (Ghostly International, 2007)
With Matthew Dear’s Asa Breed, Ann Arbor’s Ghostly International establishes once and for all its leadership in the lifestyle music marketing niche. “Stylish” doesn’t begin to describe this music, which embodies Dear’s consistently terrific work as a micro-house and techno DJ/producer (both for Ghostly and its associated labels and under aliases like the Minus-housed False), but moves the whole operation closer to pop than he or anyone on Ghostly has ever been. “Neighborhoods,” “Deserter,” and “Pom Pom” blister and pop with antiseptic rhythms created by software.

But these songs are silky too, and chic, and Dear’s congested baritone suggests a future where David Bowie’s brain has been downloaded into a handheld random phrase generator. (From “Pom Pom”: “I’ve got to figure out love!”) Asa Breed’s quieter material doesn’t slouch, either, and has its own ways of compositing acoustic elements with electronics and Dear’s vocals. “Midnight Lovers” is a love song for the human network, its acoustic guitar from a lullaby as a metal stamping beat bangs along slowly and effects groan and whine from a few blocks over. Michel Gondry should really direct its video.

Micro-house and techno’s LED-laced tentacles have increasingly crept toward sleek pop over the last few years, and Dear did too with 2003’s Leave Luck to Heaven. But there used to be the sense that the two camps would eventually recede from one another, too; that the electronic fans would get sick of the vocals and the pop kids would miss the immediacy of their genre. But just as Apparat’s recent Walls was a brilliant combination of pop moments and subtle techno beats, Asa Breed finds Dear merging technology and melody in the context of the 3-minute pop music space. Everyone’s happy, we all have something to dig, and Ghostly International is guaranteed love from fancy boutiques and all the handsome people who work inside their gleaming white walls.

– Johnny Loftus

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