Review Summary: Sci-fi-tinged missives from a Scandanavian visa office.
What separates excellent science fiction from a droll spacewalk is the sense of scale conveyed in so few words.
Whether it’s an impossibly angled street crammed with jagged architecture and puffs of intoxicating alien gasses or a vast expanse travelled in seconds, the writer’s trick is to do more with less. But unlike Azimov or Herbert, Chad Matheny of
Emperor X uses the negative space of language to make small feelings enormous, rather than new galaxies into a passing few lines.
From the abstract bureaucratic vignettes of
€30,000 to the dreamlike wandering of
God Save Coastal Dorset,
Oversleepers International sings of the mundane and forgettable put under a microscope. With irreverent but evocative lyrics, the 11 tracks are freed to be about everything and nothing at once—jumping effortlessly between chemical bonds, trade names, insurance offices, and questions of true love without suffering a second of irony or pretension.
Musically, the record refines the smart pop of his earlier work into a more cohesive offering. Accordion and gang chants of the folk-punk opener (
Wasted on the Senate Floor) retreat to introspective and sparse instrumentation of tracks like
Oversleepers International, with most songs leaning on simple tweed-crunched chords that act as a stable ground for the world-spanning lyrical material.
The analog vocal effects that run throughout his live shows add to the music rather than form a basis for it as in previous albums. The production is clean while still retaining hints of the field recording roots that kept his early work intimate—like recently uncovered ruins of some long-dead race.
Some tracks like
Schopenhauer in Berlin showcase melodic ebbs and flows that are as full of stamping rhythm as they are mystery. Few storytellers can straddle this line between universality and vagueries, elevating Matheny into the realm of
The Mountain Goats during
Oversleepers International’s highest moments.
“Will you pay for my flu shot?
I'm immune, but my heart's not (and I'm cold.)
Will we blink like the charge on a battery?
Blinking out together?
Open question.”
Of course, it wouldn’t be an
Emperor X album without some instrumental self-indulgence—the 11-minute closer is an ambient electronic piece, as is the glitchy house-adjacent
Warmth Perimeter featuring USA-based recording engineer Stephen Steinbrink.
Taken as a whole, the effects of listenability and more-questions-than-answers lyricism create the surreal feeling of a Samuel Beckett play. You may not know where you are, but you know you’re moving forward. To what or where? Only Matheny knows, and he is not prone to giving up his secrets readily.
It appears the contradiction of meaning and absence his music occupies is not lost on Matheny. As the final sung track of
Oversleepers International comes to a close, we’re caught like he is in the crux between the temporal and the eternal.
“Everything is terminal.
We're all a set of finite points.
We all exist in finite time.
We're all finite points.
We're all finite.
…but everything is permanent.”
