Review: Matthew Ryan - "From A Late Night High Rise"

Matthew Ryan - "From A Late Night High Rise"
(00:02:59, 2006)

Matthew Ryan's tenth album in as many years is the ultimate song cycle on the mortality of man. More than that, however, it's a shape shifting album that blends rock, pop and folk into a cohesive whole, tied together by Ryan's Bono-meets-Springsteen vocals. Ryan has built a reputation through the years as a true working musician, so the comparison to Springsteen doesn't seem crass to those who actually have heard his music. Songs like "Love Is A Silencer" and "And Never Look Back" cement that legacy for the 34-year-old Chester, Penn., native, but he goes beyond easy comparisons with the darker songs in the cycle, doing more to define his unique musical sound than he has on any previous work.

The ethereal opening track, "Follow The Leader," blends haunting piano with background echoes of percussion, building the stunning backdrop for Ryan's vocals on the kind of song Coldplay's Chris Martin only wishes he had the talent to compose. And when he covers Grant McClennan and Steven Kilby's "Providence," the minimalistic backdrop of faded-back drum machine and keyboards allows the vocals to come forward in a way that's simply sublime, taking care to add instruments like guitar sparingly to accent the song's raw emotion.

I've read that the inspiration for this album was Ryan's brother, who is currently serving a thirty-year prison sentence. Regardless of what led to the creation of these songs, the album's depth, Ryan's brutal honesty, speaks for itself. Though this isn't the kind of music one would ever expect to hear on the radio, it doesn’t need to be. More than any album I've heard in the second half of 2006, From A Late Night High Rise demands to be heard over and over, a testament to what really makes a great album. No lover of music should be without a copy of this album in their headphones.