Matt & Kim - Grand

Matt & Kim – Grand
 8/10

There’s nothing like a really clear, punchy pop song, and that’s precisely what Matt & Kim dish up on their second Grand. Sounding like a fun white boy block party, you can practically hear the fun rebounding off the walls of old brick buildings, screeching echoes like cars veering away from dancing pedestrians, steaming grates in the road and exploding water pumps. Opener Daylight is a lot more fleshed out than you’d expect after their killer single Good Ol’ Fashioned Nightmare, which EMJ has thrashed many a time on the radio and at home. You can see how they’ll fit perfectly live with our own Little Pictures when they come here in mid May: both duos strive for that emphatic, lo-fi bombastic pop and both do it really rather well. But Matt & Kim have my vote. There’s something unabashedly grand about Matt’s unwavering, emotive exclamations over the top of Kim’s unfaltering, loud pitter-patter of drums and crashing cymbals. I Wanna is like a diary list of goals all miraculously achieved by the song’s one-minute-forty end.

Lessons Learned is a wonderful elegy to a day’s worries in the retro fashion of fellow Totally Michael – “thinking about tomorrow won’t change how I feel today”. All songs on Grand have a life of their own, each can stand alone as an adequate representation of Matt & Kim, ie: none of the songs are shit. It just happens that Matt’s voice and intonation change little throughout the album, but this doesn’t detract from the album greatly. The clear production on Grand does wonders for their simply constructed songs, as each part is audible and distinguishable from the other. Such a well-rounded, energetic, passionate, original and enjoyable LP is hard to come by nowadays.
Sarah