Striking Matches

The Chris Gutendorf cover, thrilling in its dour vibrancy (it must be seen in color; monochrome stomps it flat), depicts strands of wires, long past their utility, stretched like corpses ’cross anonymous debris — abandoned clutter that once brought meaning to long-vanished souls. Observing this jagged vista is a sky halved in cumulus blue and a gray scrubbed drab with portent.

Yet from this tangle of rubbish, these gutted memories discarded, lost: a solitary sunflower, risen from a sour tomb. It’s the perfect illustration for Striking Matches’ “From the Wreckage”: a hope that punctures the hull of Woe. This is end-of-night music, one-more-swallow music, a vivid palette brush-stroked to life by Dustin Stallings’ reeling timbre. His stalwart swipes across six strings, whether flooded with seethe or as a series of riffs tickled loose (“Oh Vienna”; “Love Struck Committee,” where he’s joined by Kyle Ritter; “Along for the Ride”; “Shoot from the Gut”), drives the rhythms, occasionally melting into outbursts of tugs, testimonies and pleas where words just won’t suffice.

Take, for example, the last 30 seconds of “When the Dust Settles,” as the frontman cuts loose from an acoustic monologue. “Just seconds away from a dreadful disaster,” he warns before summoning his final poetic peals.
But the push begins in “Push” and a relationship already in trouble. It launches on an arresting ascent with Stallings’ burbles and keyboard leans supported by bassist Joel Gustafson and drummer Lance Lacey building a stairway to peace, love and understanding. The melody shoves aggressively forward (Lacey’s gait is relentless); the lyrics, on the other hand, reflect the losing end of a union with a dominating partner. “You pushed, I never pushed back,” the singer complains as the song ends its forward motion. Message received. Storm advisories hit like blindsides in “Short Fuse”; Gustafson’s bare-knuckled pulls — sharpened by Lacey’s insistent prods — pour a groove for Stallings’ shudder of strobes and shadows. “The Lack Thereof” rides a charge of stop-start scuffs clocked by knockabout slams. The drummer’s campaign continues, even when he’s supported solely by the pulse of bass. By then Stallings has laid down his weapon to call for a love-on-the-rocks détente. “It’s not you,” he insists, “it’s me. Can we just go back to the way things used to be?” The wash of noise that responds is overwhelmingly negative.

But the track that hits the hardest — stab-in-the-heart hard — is the one that lasts the longest. At 6 minutes 31 seconds, “In a Flash” captures a life cut short in its prime as a young man falls asleep while driving and all he knows is stilled. Through words and music, Striking Matches thread him back to flesh and bone, rendering him whole in tales of youthful pre-Millennial hell-raising up to the moment of goodbye. The band seems hesitant to leave him again: let’s hang, let’s bask, another toast of amen to “a brother, a son and a friend.” It’s a crowning achievement, moving and sweet.

But don’t let my wallow in darkness fool you. It is evening and I’ve drowned in my own glucose. Again. Remember, instead, that cover — the pallor and the sunflower. Striking Matches are that hope, that light. And long may they burn.

--Cory Frye
- Gazette Times

On their debut album, From The Wreckage, the Portland trio Striking Matches pursues the kind of intelligent, literate pop more often associated with British bands like XTC, Blur, and Radiohead. Maybe because of the rain and dismal weather we share with the Brits, Striking Matches provides a convincing argument that this style is perfectly at home here in the Northwest. Is it a coincidence that they share a name with a tune by UK power popsters Squeeze?

The Matches combine catchy, sophisticated tunes with vocalist/guitarist Dustin Stallings’ often dark, and sometimes emotionally raw lyrics. This balance is one that many bands strive for, and few attain as well as this. Too much musical sophistication, and the lyrics come off as more theater than heartfelt. On the other side of the tightrope, too much self-confession may be cathartic to the songwriter, but without finding the universal within the personal, it too often feels to the listener uncomfortably like overhearing someone else’s therapy session. Fortunately, Stallings manages to maintain this balance, throwing in some dark humor and pretty snappy vocabulary. When was the last time you heard the word “corvine” in a song? And, yeah, don’t feel bad, I had too look it up, too. It means “belonging to the crow family.”

“Push” starts the record with an riff in 7 that made me wonder if we were in for something more mathy, but it resolves into a catchy piece of pissed-off pop almost worthy of Elvis Costello at his most attractive. “Listen to the Snake” reminds me of the poppier side of Peter Gabriel-era Genesis-- bouncing electric piano, and a chorus that manages to be hooky despite relatively complex harmonies. “Short Fuse” has the kind of brittle, bass-driven funk that Gang of Four built a career around. Joel Gustafson’s bass playing, solid and inventive throughout the disc, really shines on this track.

“In a Flash”, dedicated to a friend lost to a car accident, starts out with drony solo turnpike guitar and Stallings’ simple, almost folk-song vocals. By under-emoting the vocal delivery, even as the arrangement gathers momentum, Stallings drives home the grief and redemption of the lyrics. In contrast, on “Agree to Disagree” he spits the lyrics with a lot of anger, another pissed-off love song chronicling another difficult relationship that leaves you with nothing more than a great song. “Love Struck Committee” merges surrealistic lyrics with the kind of rock anthem that U2 used to write before they started taking their own anthems too seriously. It has one of those shout-along moments that would rock a stadium of fans, should Striking Matches ever happen to find themselves in front of one.

“Mind the Gap” has one of my favorite lines on the disc. “When you get off, I suggest you erect an umbrella/ ‘cause the forecast is calling for a sh-t storm/ and mind the gap between the train and platform.” Yeah, the record has some language making it eligible for a parental guidance sticker, but kids aren’t supposed to play with Matches anyway, right? “The Lack Thereof”, like “Oh Vienna” and “Shoot from the Gut”, swing with a kind of nervous funk more Talking Heads than P-Funk. “When the Dust Settles”, the last track, is almost entirely acoustic guitar and vocals until the last minute, when the band joins in and Stallings takes a too-brief, Pink Floydian plugged-in solo.

Throughout the record, Stallings’ guitar work is pretty stellar, supporting the tunes and layering some very nice textures, but not overwhelming the songs. Drummer Lance Lacey drives the band with appropriate subtlety and no fear of rocking out when necessary. The album, recorded at Wild Rose in Corvallis, and mastered by Ryan Foster at Freq in Portland, has excellent sound quality, dynamic and full, but not over-processed. Frankly, it sounds better than some major label releases I’ve heard lately.

Striking Matches might be too clever, too literate, and too complicated to hit it big in the current pop music world, and for that, I salute them. I hope this record finds its audience, for their sake and mine, because, with a debut record that is this mature and self-assured, I really want to hear where they go next.

--Dave Trenkel
- The Alchemist Weekly