This is not a soundtrack. Let us be perfectly clear about this right from the very start. Matthew Friedberger is and he should know. He wrote, produced and performed Matricidal Sons Of Bitches, this non-soundtrack to a film that does not and will never exist. Whatever it may be, though, sprawls over forty five separate musical movements, only two of which are longer than four minutes in length, and which is then sub-divided, roughly, into four almost equal parts or themes. Ladies-in-Waiting; Brand-New Mothers; Expectant Fathers; and Dying on the Sixth Side are those themes. These titles give little insight what product lies therein.
But if for one quantum leap of the imagination it was, a soundtrack that is, well Matricidal Sons Of Bitches would be the score to a Poverty Row production. Poverty Row was the name given to a lean and hungry ragtag collection of often ephemeral Hollywood studios operating in the middle of the last century on ridiculously low budgets, churning out fast and dirty product of an invariably B-rated quality. Westerns and similarly low cost broadcast serials were its stock in trade, written, shot and then rolled out in a matter of what seemed like moments. As Friedberger himself points out, there was no time to lose.
Matricidal Sons Of Bitches shares many of Poverty Row’s central characteristics. It eschews Hollywood’s traditional glamour, razzmatazz and hyperbole and with it the music industry machine for something that is much more austere. Its forty five tracks, many not ever reaching the sixty second mark, are knocked out double-quick style, or so it seems, on Friedberger’s keyboard, haemorrhaging into each another, into their four parts and then finally into one. They often feel like embryonic ideas that have never, and perhaps never will become fully formed. They are primarily musical vignettes of hallucinatory horror and silent movies, interspersed by glimpses of exotica, kitsch, the Cotton Club, Busby Berkeley and the occasional wave of synthesized hysteria. They lurch from one non-picture to the next, the ghosts of their melodies haunting the studio lots in which they were never made.
As Matthew Friedberger moves further and further away from the relative safety of the Fiery Furnaces’ mothership it has been suggested that much in the same way that Poverty Row’s pictures became marginalised so too has his music and in so doing he is also managing to alienate his audience. On the evidence of Matricidal Sons Of Bitches nothing could be further from the truth. The widescreen picture of many of its nascent ideas is never quite fully realised and this does occasionally frustrate but when this non-soundtrack is taken as a whole it is a bold, challenging musical work that demands you to listen.
[Rating:4]
http://www.thrilljockey.com/thrill/Matthew-Friedberger/Matricidal-Sons-of-Bitches
