Even though he was not wearing his military helmet this time, as always Matthew Teardrop seemed to envision his performance like a battlefield, as he looked like a soldier giving these repetitive guitar assaults during his gut wrenching performance on Monday night at the Echo. But isn’t it how life should be perceived?
Under his hood that he kept all the time over his head, he sang with this passionate delivery and gravelly voice that he ‘always think about dyin’, he screamed his self-deprecation stories (may be that’s the Woody Allen connection?), his tales about heartbreak, loneliness and life absurdity.
I had seen Manhattan Murder Mystery before and something definitively happened when I heard the despair coming out of Teardrop’s mouth; his melodies were stuck in my head for days and his honesty transpired all over the songs although I couldn’t even understand most of what he was saying.
On Monday night, he sang most of my favorites, ‘Smoky Mountain’, ‘Ambulance’, ‘Parking Lot’, with that mix of existentialist rage and angst.
His lyrics, which don’t bother with metaphors, are as direct as Bukowski’s prose: ‘Well you got your honda prius and your HD TV/ you got cash in your pocket and a college degree/well I flunked out of high school and university/now I'm finally starting to feel the effects/ I make minimum wage and I get no respect/but I got a guitar that I can't hardly play/ I write songs about things that I feel everyday/I write songs about things that I felt in my past/ like my mother my brother my dog and my dad/ it's the only thing that keeps me from going crazy/going out in the streets and shooting somebody’, he sang in ‘Honda Prius’, or ‘Do I creep you out/Do I turn you off?’… ‘I got no class/I am just some trailer trash’ in ‘Trailer Trash’. Although I am never sure he is talking about himself or some character, but coming from his mouth it is all powerful and fueled with a desperate humor and drunken wwooo-ooo choruses.
Katya Arce on bass was constantly turning her back to the public, and Teardrop was sometimes turning his, then suddenly turning around before raising one arm to the sky, exploding his rage in front of the mic, and kneeling down several times
Yes, the music recalls at times the Velvet Underground (minus the vocals) meets the E-Street band, but the riffs are rawer, and the attitude way crazier. It is just impossible to stay indifferent during their show, the emotion is always present, constantly surfacing somewhere between Teardrop’s guitar, the trumpet and the bass, an emotion coupled with adrenaline, as if there was a latent violence fueled by despair and hopelessness.
They closed the show as they did last time, and probably as they close all their shows, with the slow burn anthem-song ‘Parking Lot’, Teardrop descending among the crowd, grabbing some people around the neck, then dropping his guitar and quickly leaving the scene; because on the battlefield of life, it may be the only sane thing to do, leave and run as fast as you can.