The last time we featured Matt Kivel, in a review of 2022 record bend reality ~ like a wave, we wrote of how the variation in the Austin songwriter’s catalogue has often felt like an attempt to convey the inexpressible. “If anything has united his shifting, inventive style across the last decade,” we wrote, “it is that of an endless search. Something evident in his willingness to blend and blur genre conventions, as though each record was looking for that ideal combination, a sound able to answer a question, or communicate something otherwise incomprehensible.”
All of which is important to consider when introducing his new project, Wine Country. The band, which sees Kivel joined by pals Andy Aylward and John Zakoor, feels like both the pinnacle of this journey and its complete antithesis. The sound of someone arriving at their ideal destination at the exact moment they stop actively trying to get there. The liner notes for the debut Wine Country record, Hard Times, put the terms “written” and “composed” in inverted commas, a small gesture which speaks volumes. Because these are not songs finely wrought or painstakingly crafted brick by brick. Rather they just arrived, epiphany-like, Kivel a willing lightning rod struck by a bolt of pure inspiration. “[I] can’t explain how it was written or where it came from,” Kivel describes of the title track in an Instagram post. “But it felt like someone was speaking through me when I put those words together for the first time
Musically, Wine Country finds Matt Kivel at his freest. In the past he has drawn on cinema and literature, folk music and ambient music and experimental jazz. But here, in keeping with the overall vibe, things just flow where they want. Long, meandering pieces of psych-tinged art rock, improvisational lyrics that nonetheless feel charged with poetry and meaning. A testament to the value of committing to something without inhibition, and allowing the result to speak on its own terms rather than being edited and overworked beyond its proper shape. Hard Times is inspiration uncut. Not so much an attempt to communicate something otherwise incomprehensible as an embrace of the incomprehensible itself.
Hey baby we were born to die
Let’s face the facts of letting days go by
Pain don’t hurt