Eric Matthews, It's Heavy In Here

Is there a better Track One than "Fanfare"? I was not ten seconds into this song, the first time I heard it, and I was sold. The song's title is apt: it's an announcement, an unfurling of banners, a calling card, that commences the celebration and assures you the whole album is going to be as worthwhile as the first song. I first heard Eric Matthews through Wes (of course�he also introduced me to Trip Shakespeare, Japan, Primus, Firehose, the Lemonheads, Yes, Jeff Buckley, Joni Mitchell, Weather Report, XTC, and The The�and that was just in high school) during my freshman year of college, and had the album by the following summer. I guess, being between my first and second year of college, I needed something to encourage me to look forward, not back, stop holding grudges, grow the hell up, and not be such a fucking sap.

The lyrics of "Fanfare" proclaim thusly: it might be late, but time is guided by open minds that fight disguises and I'm tired and none too thrilled with yearnings that mustn't be filled. This ethos accompanied the mild, safe hedonism that I found with my friends that summer of '96, walking around in Grinnell's incomparable summer greenness, renting stupid movies, making stupid movies of our own (Neil and I made a five-minute action epic called Death Of A Corporate Giant wherein we blow up Wal-Mart, but that's another story), getting naked and streaking the country club golf course, going on late-night drives around the town's outskirts. "Fried Out Broken Girl" is one of those cinematic songs that evokes diagonal sheets of rain falling on a city at night to the mournful cadence of piano and trumpet, and the elegant lyrical inversion from so selfish boy and girl / in careful webs they twirl in the first verse, to so pitiful boy meets girl / in beautiful beds they twirl in the final verse.

Eric Matthews was chamber pop�s reigning champion in a genre that was sparsely populated to begin with. He makes this music sound so effortless, so smooth, and that's how it escapes the twee preciousness that would hound any arrangement of strings, horns and harps in less capable hands. Harpsichord-and-string waltzes might sound stuffy in theory, but "Three-Cornered Moon" is transcendent, providing the redemption its protagonist so desperately needs: spend time above me, I feel so below thee / you said you'd understand whether far away, or hand in hand. Despite the delicacy and brevity of these fourteen songs, the album bows out with some muscle on its penultimate track, "Sincere Sensation", with pounding drums and a chorus that rises to the higest notes in Matthews' register: down to earth, that's where you'll stay / beauties fly away.

The reprise of "Fanfare" that follows is the perfect capstone and evidence of the calming, refining effect the previous forty-five minutes have had on the listener: eschewing the strident drums, horns and Harrisonesque quitars of its forebear, it lays us down to rest with just acoustic guitar and a lonely vocal. It's Heavy In Here balanced light and heavy elements perfecly, which is exaclty what I needed that summer that I turned twenty, poised as I was between a confusing adolescence and the bizarre decade to come. It's some small comfort the music itself has not changed in the intervening years.

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