Aarktica, Matchless Years

reviewed by dave heaton

The cover photographs for Aarktica's new CD Matchless Years will be universal to anyone who's spent much time in a bar: the lighting, the draft beers, the music, the people, the darkness outside. I've never been to that particular bar, but the photos are comforting; a bar is in some ways a hermetic environment, sealing out some things and sealing in others. The bar in the photos is Matchless, so the title refers to years spent there, though of course they're words that work in other ways as well. And the eight songs on the album do give the sense of late-night wanderers, struggling with demons within or without. The music is a refined version of Aarktica's style, where dark electro-pop music joins with experimental drone and the two become one. The Eastern vibe of the last Aarktica release, Bleeding Light, is present in two instrumentals. And there's also a heavy-metal element this time around, in the songs "Arms" and "Happiness Boys" in particular. All of those musical directions jibe well with the theme of people fumbling in the dark.

From my perspective Matchless Years begins and ends with beauty, shaded deep blue for loneliness. The opener "Seventy Jane", one of Aarktica mastermind Jon DeRosa's most sublime songs yet, has some hope in its melody, but that's really more infatuation than hope, as the protagonist reveals the flame he holds for another lost soul. "For people like us there are no happy endings / only endings," he decides. At the album's close is another tale of tragic love, the ballad "Matchless", with its image of a couple swimming out from Brooklyn, late in the night, and vanishing into the waters. It's followed by an extended lullaby/eulogy for them in the form of the instrumental "Rooftop Films", a lovely goodbye drift.

In between those is a collection of songs built around this same vision of late-night hopelessness, bleak yet romantic. "I Name You Sleep", with Kendall Jane Meade (of Mascott) on harmony vocals, is a hushed ballad, calming in tone, about feeling lost, empty and afraid: "Avoiding the light, barely alive." "Arms" and "Happiness Boys" both seem heavy-metal in spirit and lyrics, if only subtly in sound, with the former's paranoia about a demonic temptress and the latter's theme-song of a late-night gang in search of happiness. The album's final line "In the absence of the sun / you will shine and burn and blaze / all day" seems directed to the bar itself, which is a lurking character here of its own.

Every Aarktica album concisely puts forth its own feeling. In some ways this one seems both more personal and more universal. It has human beings searching for meaning, for a sense of home, escaping into darkness. In the musical marketplace Aarktica might live in the shadows as well, but their meeting of songs and atmosphere, sound and vision, is incomparable.

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