The town of Chester, Pennsylvania is, according to Matthew
Ryan, "A small town, about five miles in any direction.
Seventy percent of it was housing projects. I lived on the edge
of them. It was tough." The image that instantly comes to
mind is one of a bleak and desolate place, where despair and
sorrow walk hand-in-hand down streets that have laid claim to
the hopes, dreams, and lives of a beggar's parade of countless
faceless and nameless souls. The type of streets that can spawn
both demons and poets. Matthew Ryan is a poet.
"Mayday" is the debut album for the twenty-five-year-old,
sandpaper-throated Ryan. Five seconds into the album, and a couple
of his early influences are clear. Shades of Tom Petty and Bruce
Springsteen make their presences felt in Ryan's vocal style and
delivery. But the storytelling is all his own. Darker and more
eloquent than Petty; and more image-evoking and poetic than Springsteen,
Ryan has an uncanny knack of taking material that we know we've
heard before, and reinventing it with such an intensely poignant
personal voice that we know we're listening to someone who soon
might well become the master of the game. In fact, this is the
one overwhelming characteristic of the album. Recorded in a pop/country
flavored style that has become overly commercial in recent years,
I might have been tempted to dismiss it as yet another generic
release attempting to limp along and cash in on the same jangle-rock
path that has carried all too many other acts lately. But Ryan
blows any suspicion of that right out of the water.
It is clear to see that his voice comes straight from the soul.
Pain, anger, guilt, self-condemnation and self-forgiveness -
these are issues he knows well, and Ryan is capable of delivering
each line with such emotional conviction that his audience is
swept along in this drowning pool of heartache and heaven lost
with nary a whimper.
The love of language is clearly evident in Ryan's compositions.
With words, Ryan can splash images on the canvas of the mind
the way an artist creates pictures with a brush. Even taken purely
as they are, straight off the CD sleeve, Ryan's lyrics are written
as poetry. Stark and uncolored, they tell the tales of the survivors
of lives, dreamlike in their existence, yet often nightmarish
in their pain. Add to this musical compositions that are smart
and insightful, poignant and angst-filled, upbeat and hope-filled,
and you have an excellent offering from an artist that will almost
certainly enjoy a long and prolific career doing what he obviously
delights in doing best - hypnotizing his audience with well-spun
tales of their own mortality and humanity. And perhaps their
own immortality and inhumanity. |
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