33 years of age is one of those landmark years, like 21 or 60, and not just because it is the age Jesus Christ died, though surely partially for that reason. If your teens are for school, and your twenties are transitional, at 33 years of age you are where you are with a double lucky number. At 33 years of age you feel that everything is now in place for whatever takes you to the end of the line.
So Omaha’s favorite son Matt Whipkey’s follow up to Penny Park: Omaha, NE: Summer 1989, Underwater, has the weight of a place and time that feels set: it isn’t the nostalgia of Penny Park,it is a darker hued memory album, or character study at least. With his backing band the Whipkey Three (aka Scott Zimmerman, Korey Anderson and Robert Carrig) adding a classic rock sound behind him, it is gerrymanded rock, it is all swirls of keyboards and 4/4 backbeats, all sweet melodicism and backbone bass: it is the real deal for a world that doesn’t realize it misses the real deal.
The ten songs that constitute Underwater are also memory songs, songs for friends and lovers, dead, alive, moving in and out of Matt’s life, story songs in the extreme. He writes prosody, telling his stories with a succinctness that seems to be very sure that its job is to tell clear stories of his life but also to express them universally. A toughie but really he pulls it off with a sure hand even as his songs don’t really remind you of any one else at all. With the interrupting harp you might think a little of Dylan in rock mode, and any time you are listening to classicist rocking out in 2015 you think Tom Petty but there is no country (except once a slide guitar), E Street Band but there’s no horns, it isn’t simple enough for punk and it is too much a form of sound for indie rock, too obsessed for dash-core. Whipkey is his own guy.Good for him but bad for business?
The result is a one-two opening that is a breathless smash, “Underwater” and “1:59”.I’ve mentioned Matt’s penchant for the mythic before -he even looks like a Marvel comic hero, but into the myth with the first line on what remains one of the best songs of the year, Matt sings: “Met a woman named Marieclair, never met a Marieclair before…” and the song heads straight into a relationship while you try and catch up but from the name on it is bigger then the story, and by the very next song “1:59” (closing time in Omaha, apparently) the relationship is over. The guitar break here is a purist dream of electrified awesomeness.
But after that you can’t hide from the darkness that covers the song and it is a pity that life can hurt so much. “Calendar Song” and “Dreams Of Kathleen” are both central to the coldest winter vibe. The latter rides a harp very very hard and it sounds beautiful but the loop is waltz like and the mood and the memory is not far away (four years) but it is so much painful, it is fun in a misery loves company manner. It is beautiful song and it builds to a place you can’t get out of: the end of the affair, the neighbors listening to them shouting. By the finale “we’re no longer keeping any contact…”. A heartbreaker and the third best song on the album. The band rides the beat all the way through.
The stories continue, accumulate, “Gary Flanagan” a rowdy howdy to a buddy that is really quite special in its tenderness. Another song goes “Sam you are my friend, I’ll see you when the wind blows you back again” and has an edge of really sweet sorrow. As Freedy Johnston (actually, the best comparison for Matt I’ve found so far) once put it: “You have to write about something”.
By the end of the album, Matt is telling us “Not Gonna Change” with a plaintive intro that sounds like folk with a slide guitar. We don’t want Matt to change, we want him to continue this way. Too good to be a regional phenom, too old fashioned to find an easy way out of Omaha, if Matt does what he does till he does it, that’s gonna do just fine.
Grade: A-
