There is no punk band currently working that is so strikingly unique as The Matches. Last time out, the band shocked listeners when it turned the genre upside down, shook it violently and handed their audience a slightly fractured and very abstract group of songs to try and decode with little or no explanation. For A Band In Hope though, The Matches have chucked that idea and arched a hard left turn that, while the direction they’re headed in now still has some dark overtones, represents still another significant departure for the band.
This time The Matches look to The Cure to find what ails them. Far more dramatic and even more theatrical than they’ve attempted previously, the squalling but far from simple guitar lines and classically informed, occasionally absurdist piano bring to mind what Robert Smith may have become interested in had he hung around just a little longer with Siouxie and The Banshees. It’s still a twisted line upon which The Matches tread, but now it’s also a far more rockist one and all arrows lead to Cure at some point in their career. “AM Tilts” bears a passing resemblance—with its extended instrumental outro and ominous textures throughout—to something The Cure could have written around Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, “To Build A Mountain” is playful in a “The 13th," Wild Mood Swings kind of way and “Their City” is vintage, classic Cure in every way—except, of course, that they didn’t write it.
By the time “Between Halloweens," “If I Were You” and “Yankee Chip Ship” roll around, The Matches have retreated into the most deliriously happy pop punk-rock they’ve ever written, but with the preceding eerie and Cure-ish lead-up, one has to wonder if such trappings aren’t simply meant to be ironic; a sort of odd comic relief that the band tosses off in a Shakespearean way of saying that, if you didn’t like what you just heard, don’t worry—it might not have happened, it may have all been a dream.
All of this calls into question what exactly it is that The Matches are playing at; with three albums out, the group has changed directions three times and while each bears a passing raw sonic resemblance to the others, there isn’t any way of knowing what will come next. Perhaps that’s the point in and of itself: by keeping audiences guessing, The Matches ensure that true fans will keep coming back because they want to see how the story ends. As the brief closer, “Proctor Rd.” fades into oblivion, you can almost hear singer Shawn Harris whisper, “To be continued….”
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