Matt Schickele
Cities Filled With Lights
Feldspar
Cities Filled With Lights is an album filled with beautifully idiosyncratic, creatively arranged songs. However unassuming they may seem at first listen, there’s a lot of funny stuff happening in Matt Schickele’s music. His lyrics run towards the abstract (“and nothing used to feel this laughy and strange/since we can’t drive I guess we can steal the road”) and the instrumentation runs the gamut from piano, percussion, and clarinet to “noise guitar” and accordion. Some songs, like “Crumbs,” stomp around atonally, while others like “Treat” are lovingly rendered, filled with a plaintive delivery and simple, lovely melodies. Schickele’s delivery leans toward the strained, but he’s got a falsetto that’ll shatter windows. Cities Filled With Lights is decidedly worth checking out, and seeing that Knitting Factory distributes it, it shouldn’t be difficult to get a hold of.
Feldspar, P.O. Box 1698, NYC 10013. http://www.feldsparrecords.com
