Cincinnati’s Maurice Mattei wouldn’t refuse a taste of success. Given the opportunity, I think he would gladly allow one of his brilliant story songs to be used in an appropriate manner in a decent film for a respectable payday. The point is that he doesn’t write and sing and perform to that particular end. Mattei might welcome a shot at the brass ring, but he’s not in the business of building carousels for that express purpose.
Mattei does what he does in the service of the songs that come to him. Some arrive unbidden, some he must cajole into being and some put up rather a stiff fight before shimmering into existence. But however they arrive, if they have the heart to stick around, Mattei will offer them a place in his set list, and if they’re very lucky, he will take them into a studio and document them and send them out into the wider world in a more permanent form. And he never ever forgets that the songs are the most important element in the equation. There are no answers without questions, no sums without parts, no destinations without journeys. And for Mattei, there is no life without songs and, most importantly, no songs without life.
That is the hallmark of Mattei’s evocative and richly detailed songs; they are brimming with life. They might not always reflect the most beautiful or smartest or happiest aspects of life, but they will always tell you exactly how they feel and they will ultimately guide you to feelings of your own.
There are plenty of feelings on Girl Jungle, Mattei’s 22nd album in a career that stretches back to the early ’90s, but sometimes they come with an almost dizzying degree of misdirection. Take the album’s credits, for example: Mattei presents us with a quartet of gorgeous, unattainable women who presumably comprise his backing band on the album. But even a cursory spin through Girl Jungle will reveal that there is nothing on the album save for Mattei’s voice and guitar, and so the girls in his jungle are unattainable even to him (although Mattei did take their photographs in some frozen moment long ago, and they do his design bidding in the present tense).
Unattainability is a strong theme on Girl Jungle, as Mattei details encounters with an astonishing range of women, from the not-exactly striking and yet still untouchable exotic dancer in “There’s Candy” to the lofty Spanish beauty whose beckoning goes unheeded in “A Little Too Late” to the tarnished goddess in “I Found a Fallen Angel.”
But it’s not merely the women that are just out of reach on Girl Jungle: Peace of mind eludes the narrator in the brilliantly referential “Look the Other Way”; the truth is a malleable chunk of clay that can be shaped into a convenient reality in “Nobody Wants to Know”; intimacy and security give way to uncertainty and paranoia in “Nothing in a Row”; and memories and music itself drift in and out of focus in “Radio Ten.”
Like the bulk of Mattei’s wonderfully tremulous catalog, Girl Jungle finds the adept songwriter shining his lovelight through the kaleidoscope of his musical influences, resulting in unique but colorfully familiar reflections and dancing patterns. Like picking flecks of individual colors out of a mosaic, it’s not difficult to identify fleeting touches of Bob Dylan, Randy Newman, Steve Forbert, Bruce Springsteen, maybe even Iggy Pop and Jimmy Buffett, but the larger sonic picture that Mattei creates is always a fascinating and personal self-portrait.
Find more on Maurice Mattei at mmattei.com. (Review by Brian Baker)
Free ArtSong Series Returns
The free weekly concert series ArtSong returns for its for 51st year starting Friday at the Cincinnati Art Museum (953 Eden Park Drive, cincinnatiartmuseum.org).
The series, running every Friday in July, features an array of area Folk/Americana artists. This week’s opening show features Full Moon Ranch, Greg Schaber & Chris Werner, Hu-Town Holler and The Back Porch Hounds. The rest of the ArtSong shows’ lineups feature Barefoot in the Briar Patch, The Corncobs, John Redell & Erin Coburn and Hickory Robot (July 17); Dean Vamvas & Friends, The Mamadrones, Lenny Hall and Tracy Walker (July 24); and Noah Wotherspoon & Jessi Bair, Mike Oberst, Greg Hines and The Jericho Old Time Band (July 31).
Music begins at 8 p.m. each week. For more on the series, visit queencityballadeers.org. ©
