Matilyn
Dark, brooding memories that haunt the soul, Matilyn documents with stunning clarity the scars broken, bad relationships bring. Arrangements keep things to the essentials, allowing the narrative’s focus to continue unabated. The tempos keep things dirge-like. Piano, drums, and the riffs that emerge revolve around a partnership long gone sour. Experiencing these draining relationships is worse than being alone because they change you; they scar you, leaving you never quite the same way again. It hurts doubly because those who have not gone through it fail to translate what is being said. Yet, Matilyn continues, expressing her unfiltered emotions for the world, for the hope that it can create a semblance of peace for the listener who has encountered these things, to know they are not alone.
Hurt frames the whole narrative. With a deeper set voice whose message reverberates, nods to Fiona Apple’s heavy narratives echo in the milky twilight. Much like Fiona’s work, Matilyn has this rawness to her approach with no light piercing the stories. On the sheer rawness of the recording, the intimacy of which is nearly uncomfortable, some of Jessica Pratt’s bare-bones poetry draws the listener closer than they would ever want to be. Intimacy can be unsettling in some ways, particularly when those whispered messages contain this much pain. Slowcore aesthetics and heartache define the soundscape, making her work reminiscent of Low’s earliest works. Even with these touchstones, her work truly feels unique, a diamond in the rough.
“Invisible Scar” hovers around what words do to a relationship, and how that emotional abuse lingers. Unlike physical pain, the dull ache of being mistreated is much harder to express, to share with others, because the actual evidence of those actions simply is not there. The Gothic undertones take shape in Ian Curtis’s work with Joy Division. Hypnotic cycles in “I Know Why” have her revisit the moments that haunt her and how they have sculpted her worldview. Little flourishes at the periphery suggest that moments of trying to escape this negative mindset are fleeting, and that these feelings will follow through on anything. Pain radiates throughout “I Love You” where the love is bitter, broken, and unsatisfying. When we give ourselves to another, we expect to be repaid in kind, yet that’s far from the reality in many cases. Sometimes the partnership is lopsided, one person giving far more, getting drained, seeing the old personality they once possessed fully gone. “Do You Love Me?” follows a similar impulse. The insecurity, the decay of the chords, shows that the truth is harder to find. Insecurity is a sign of an unstable relationship, of manipulation as the manipulator lets the other person suffer with constant questioning, nothing ever made clear. Realization of a broken promise hits hard on the sorrow of “It’s Not Real.” A true ode to the romantic spurned, the verses cut to the rawest nerve, as the message of one with time and life wasted is captured in all its heartbreak.
Matilyn goes for sheer emotional intensity within her carefully executed sonic universes, like starlight of past events finally reaching the listener long after they have already happened.