Matthew Dear - Black City

 Wild Beasts recently described their Two Dancers album as ‘downbeat erotic music’. It’s a description which would also apply to Matthew Dear’s latest record, Black City. Darkly funky, imbued with a distinct dose of sleaze and home to Dear’s now-familiar but still weird treated vocals, it is a bewitching, unsettling set. It’s a terrific slab of downbeat, song-driven electro; low key, but easily able to achieve high impact.

Unafraid to take his time establishing a mood, Dear’s music bleeds out of the speakers. ‘I Can’t Feel’ is a strange, glitchy funk that’s impossible to dance to. Nine-minute centrepiece ‘Little People’ opens with what initially seem to be Cut Copy-aping dancefloor-friendly moves, only to become more and more discordant and fragmented as it goes along. It’s utterly fantastic! There’s an almost Neon Indian-esque sadness to the excellent ‘Slowdance’ – and the way this sadness nestles into the outright sleaze of ‘You Put a Smell on Me’ (“If you take a ride / In my big black car / Don’t talk too much”) jars, but in a good way, creating the sort of queasy comedown depicted on the silver screen in the second half of Boogie Nights. Luxurious closing track ‘Gem’s piano-driven melody comes on like a slow-motion TV on the Radio, rounding proceedings off in a melancholy, but deeply satisfactory manner.

Around the turn of the millennium it became fashionable for the deeply pretentious to talk of their records as being “soundtracks to as-yet-unmade films”. Such nonsense has thankfully passed into the annals, but it is tempting to categorise Black City as such – it’s hard not to picture it as a backdrop to moving images; probably a film in which a menacing lead character drives around some dimly lit fringes of Vegas looking for girls and trouble. Still, imagined films or otherwise, Black City is a compelling slow grind of a record, which surpasses the rest of his sprawling back catalogue and puts itself among the best electronic releases of the year.