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Black City

by Matthew Dear

/
  • Streaming + Download

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    Purchasable with gift card

      $10 USD

     

  • Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    - Released 2010

    Includes unlimited streaming of Black City via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    ships out within 2 days
    Purchasable with gift card

      $10 USD or more 

     

  • Standard Vinyl
    Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    Limited Edition Repress of Matthew Dear's Black City on Standard Vinyl.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Black City via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

    Sold Out

  • Limited Edition Vinyl
    Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    Limited Edition Repress of Matthew Dear's Black City on Black Smoke Vinyl.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Black City via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

    Sold Out

1.
Honey 03:47
2.
I Can't Feel 04:18
3.
4.
Slowdance 04:22
5.
Soil To Seed 02:28
6.
7.
Shortwave 05:12
8.
Monkey 03:39
9.
More Surgery 05:30
10.
Gem 04:07
11.

about

*This is a reissue of 2010's Black City, and will begin shipping on or around October 12th, 2018*

Matthew Dear's Black City can't be found on any map. It's a composite, an imaginary metropolis peopled by desperate cases, lovelorn souls, and amoral motives. Like most literary Gothams, Black City is a place to love and hate, as seedy as a nightclub's back room and as seductive as the promise of power. Matthew Dear, the musician, may live in New York City, but the Matthew Dear of Black City inhabits a sound-world unlike any other: a monument to the shadowy side of urban life that bumps and creaks, shudders and wakes up screaming in the middle of the night. _Black City_ is Matthew Dear's third album on Ghostly International, and it's his darkest and most engrossing work to date.

From the first notes of album opener "Honey", it's clear that the love-obsessed Matthew Dear of 2007's Asa Breed has given way to a more existentially paranoid entity, as creeping tempos dominate, cavernous atmospherics envelop the listener, and strange distortions crackle on the horizon. In Black City, nothing is at it seems: leadoff single "Little People (Black City)" is a nine-and-a-half minute disco odyssey, subverting its gleaming electronic lead with eerily giddy backing vocals and cryptic, ominous lyrics ("a frozen wasted heart / has died", "love me like a clown"); "You Put a Smell on Me" is a sordid sex romp set to hysterically chattering percussion and a serrated synth line that will set your teeth on edge; "More Surgery" at first recalls the barely-there Krautrock of Harmonia in its burbling minimalism, until Dear's chanted chorus of "Alter genetics / to make my body glow / I need more surgery / there's so much more to know" sends the track hurtling into a dystopian future.

And yet, for all the foreboding moods on Black City, it's the album's sweeter moments that illustrate Matthew Dear's growing maturity as a songwriter. "Slowdance" is a futuristic lullaby in which Dear articulates a lover's helplessness ("I can't be the one to tell you everything's wrong") over breathy, Arthur Russell-esque cello swishes; the album-closing "Gem" is an achingly simple, reverb-drenched piano ballad that ends with a long, slow fade. Even in Matthew Dear's Black City, there is hope.

credits

released October 12, 2018

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Matthew Dear Ann Arbor, Michigan

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