Austin-based singer-songwriter Matthew Squires has been releasing music since 2012, amassing eight albums of idiosyncratic indie pop that’s playful, cutting and weird enough to get close to capturing the contemporary US moment. Songs ironic yet somehow sincere too, absurd yet entirely serious. The style culminated with 2019’s Visions of America, a record pitched somewhere between Built to Spill and The Mountain Goats which included references to everything from a world on fire to jokes featuring Lincoln, Hitler and Donald Duck.
Out this autumn, forthcoming release The Electric River sees Matthew Squires continue his journey into America’s strange heart, again joined by trusty backing band the Learning Disorders. With Gianni Sarmiento (lead guitar, backup vocals), James Lavery (lead guitar), Savanah Shanks (synth, backup vocals), Zane Frisch (bass guitar) and Ray Flynt (drums, backup vocals), the release sees a pivot toward a starker, country-psych sound. One attuned not only to the revelationary terror of our current situation but also the search for meaning and goodness within such a world.
There could be no better introduction to the release than lead single ‘The Ballad of Norm MacDonald’. A classic highway visitation song updated for late capitalism—an age of precarious labour, commodification and ubiquitous entertainment. Like Steve Earle’s ‘The Tennessee Kid’ if it wasn’t Satan who visited the narrator but some kind of modern-day saint. Norm MacDonald to be exact. Fittingly written after a long shift at Whole Foods.
“I had been chewing on the almost Andy Kaufmanesque way he died and listened to some very enigmatic interviews he had given about life and death, where he seemed to me to have a strong Kierkegaardian streak,” Matthew Squires explains. “When I wrote the song, in a way I was trying to pay homage to the spirit of his idiosyncratic brand of humour, what with my sort of ironic playing around with the trope of the balladeer who talk-sings at the beginning of a song about walking down a highway.” Just as MacDonald repurposed old tropes with a balance of irony and earnestness, so to does Squires this country archetype. A religious experience both terrifying and thrilling and utterly bizarre.