Matthew Good Reborn
Fights Through Depression and Bipolar Disorder with Hospital Music
Band: Matthew Good
Album: Hospital Music
Release Date: July 31, 2007
Label: Universal Records
Genre: Rock
Members: Matthew Good
Guests: Pat Stewart, Rod Bruno, Nadia Johnson, Ryan Dahle, Andrew Shaw
From: British Columbia, Canada
Listening to Matthew Good’s latest album, Hospital Music, is an intense and intimate experience. The audible landscape is completely barren, save for Matt’s wavering voice howling through your ears.
This record is at times difficult to listen to because it’s so brutally honest; as subtle as road-kill. Stripped to the bone, the majority of the tracks are carried along by minimal strumming on an acoustic guitar and Matt’s ghostly voice. The minimalist aura of the record is what makes it such an intimidating experience, because you have nowhere else to look but in Matt’s eyes; he grabs the listener by the shoulders and forces them to sit and listen to his inflamed story.
The Story
The story goes like this: Last year Matt was diagnosed with bipolar disorder while struggling to keep his marriage and his life intact; he was also fighting off an addiction to anxiety medication that almost got him killed one fateful evening. Through some self-reflective meditation and subsequent scribbling, Hospital Music was born.
Seven records into his career, Matt experienced a legitimate rebirth as an artist and human being and documented that change in painful and gory detail in Hospital Music.
The cover art shows a red painting of Matt with a sky blue background – a perfect metaphor for the album; Hospital Music a flare shot during a time of dire desperation.
The Highlights
The ominous opener, “Champions of Nothing”, crawls along your skin, slowly digging its claws deeper and deeper until the pain becomes unbearable. Crass lines like “There’s something in your ‘too cool for school’ / When you slide up and down my pole / There’s something in the way you look / That only casts a shadow” eventually pounce without mercy.
“A Single Explosion” is a gorgeous love story, reliving Matt’s own near-death experience with medication and his acceptance of his condition. He cries, “I can’t write love songs when I’m on these / I’m affable, responsible, but hard to be around / It’s correctable, they’re right you know” and he closes the song with the lines “On my chest you put your head / And said… / There you are / There you are / There’s my heart”. From totally numb to completely alive.
The best written song is arguable “Metal Airplanes”. The track, like the title would suggest, is a cold and emotionless tirade. It leaves no room for the heart to breathe any sort of sentiment. The song is bled dry of any feeling it may have once had. It’s grotesque, but there’s also beauty in the corpse; or rather, a tragic reminder of what the beauty once was.
Another excellently composed track is “99% of Us is Failure”. Particularly moving are the four lines “Blackbird come the break of dawn / The TV’s on, I turn it off / Walk outside, get in the car / Stare at the wheel then fall apart”. The imagery encompasses the deconstruction of life that the song examines, delivering a very bleak outlook. Yet again, buried in this sorrow is some splendour. It embraces the intricate details of our habitual lifestyles, of the elaborate clock we all follow. We all start and end in the same place; we all fall apart together.
Hospital Music is Matthew Good at a precipice. Where he goes from here is anybody’s guess. One thing is certain, though: the view from here is breathtaking.
Hospital Music by Matthew Good
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