Scott Matthews – Elsewhere

A little bit of patronage can go a long way. Wolverhampton based Scott Matthews has been spending a lot of time recently with another son of the Black Country, a certain Mr Robert Plant. Matthews was tour support for Plant and Krauss’s jaunt around the UK, and when I saw him last year at a cavernous Wembley I thought it a shame the majority of the crowd treated his set with more or less indifference. Because while they were loosening their ties and barking into mobile phones, Matthews was really rather good, as was his debut album Passing Stranger, which spawned the extremely great single ‘Elusive’. Robert Plant is obviously very taken with him then, as he performs here, on the excellent track ’12 Harps’. Plant makes no attempt for glory, his vocal subtle but engaging, scattered blossom on a light melody plucked on sensitive, raw guitar. Also good is the single ‘Fractured’, almost the equal of ‘Elusive’, and the delicate ‘Jagged Memory’, a song of sparseness undercut with a sheen of violin and a vulnerable vocal from Matthews.And as for the rest of the album ”“ well, here is the problem. It seems to inflict you with selective amnesia. Modern technology tells me that I have listened to it half a dozen times or so, but I would be hard pushed to tell you how a single song goes. It is utterly unmemorable, with the aforementioned three songs seeming to sit in the middle of a big black musical hole. That is not to say it isn’t distinctive, and it is entirely agreeable when I am listening to it. But switch the album off and I would be hard pressed to recount a single melody or lyric. I would struggle to give you a rough idea of how even a single song goes.It is a bit like those moments when you are driving, and suddenly find yourself a mile or two down the road with no recollection of how you got there. It doesn’t mean that there is anything wrong with the journey, just that it was not engaging enough to leave a lasting impression. Matthews has the ability to create semblance of good music, but not enough to leave you with anything more than a vague memory of what you have heard. 53%Scott Matthews on MySpace