White Light Rock and Roll Review - Matthew Good

White Light Rock and Roll Review

Matthew Good
Universal Records.

SCQ Rating: 68%

If you feel like this record sticks out like a sore thumb in the Matthew Good discography, it does: it’s the only MG full-length to forego a well publicized marketing pitch, written lyrics in the liner notes and his mug on the front sleeve. Although none of these factors are telling on their own, the combination of the three explains much about Matthew Good circa 2004. Married, settled and, for the first time while under public scrutiny, visibly self-satisfied, Good had accidentally settled his career in a similar fashion: the material was still unmistakably his, but the delivery felt complacent. Like countless artists before him, the romance and money that Good’s success afforded him had stolen that passionate craving that wrote such intensely personal songs, and thusly, the talented songwriter looked backward.

As the record’s premise and title suggest, Good opted to engage the history of rocknroll head on; the classic Who-affected riffs of ‘Ex-Pats of the Blue Mountain Symphony Orchestra’, the modern Strokes-appeal of ‘Poor Man’s Blue’, and all the meat-and-potatoes rock he’d virtually laughed at through the Audio of Being era. Although these genre exercises rarely rival his past work, White Light Rock and Roll Review offers a decent cross-section of worthy Good compositions. Like the majority of Avalanche, his political oeuvre is reinforced by ‘Alert Status Red’ and ‘Blue Skies over Bad Lands’, both fine additions that surpass their obvious opinionated leanings (unlike ‘North American For Life’, which by comparison feels scrawled down like a bar-band’s effigy).

While his dedication to troubles of the world at large remains fervent, Good’s ever-potent lyrics of reflection save this album from becoming another blasé set of protest songs. The pedal-steel strummed ‘Empty Road’ is unmatched here, a lovely, idyllic song about growing into the world we’re faced with, while ‘It’s Been Awhile Since I Was Your Man’ strikes a nostalgic nerve that finds Good at his most candid. Neither of these highlights approaches the heart-wrought beauty of classics ‘Bright End of Nowhere’ or ‘Life From the Minimum Safe Distance’, but to Good’s credit, the majority of recording was completed in nine days – an intentional decision that helped capture these songs at their rawest incarnation.

After Loser Anthems’ experimentation and Avalanche’s lush arrangements, White Light Rock and Roll Review comes as a middling point; neither revisiting conquests won nor stepping forward with anything particularly new. Due to recording constraints and being pressed between two far more attention-grabbing albums, these songs have taken on a dark-horse status, occasionally ill-advised but splendid for a change of pace.