Now You Are Gone by Matt Roberts

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- Smother Magazine (USA)

'Given the recent success of fellow SNAGs James Blunt and Damien Rice, Matt Roberts should have no trouble finding a following with this effort.'

- Mediasearch.com.au (Australia)

MATT ROBERTS IS GOOD FOR YOU:

Delicious piano pop designed to linger and satisfy long after the first listen.Dr Roberts is a songwriter, performer and producer like no other. More Paul than John. More Billy than Elton. But in the end, more Matt Roberts than anything else.

“I drive a sensible car. I own a Labrador. I am not Rock.”

So says electroacoustic songmaker Dr Matt Roberts, on the nationwide launch of his new album Now You Are Gone (Sound Vault Records). But here’s the thing - listen closely and you will be rocked. Roberts’ lyrics are the key, stories throbbing with humanity, images drenched in life-flavour that transform perfectly acceptable pop songs into perfect pop.

Despite leanings towards genres such as acoustica/folk and musical theatre/cabaret, Roberts is happy to swim in the big pond of pop, aspiring to a form of pop that defies the rapid cycle of consumption and obsolesence.

“The song you buy the record for is high-GI, it’s McPop, it has to be to survive in the airplay jungle. But you’ll get sick of it pretty soon. Take a record home, and it’s the low-GI tunes, the slow-burners that decide if you’ll still be listening to it in years to come.”

That’s where Dr Roberts’ songs come into their own, because if you invite them in, they’ll stick around. It’s not a record, it’s a relationship.

And we’d all agree, a good relationship rocks.

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MATT ROBERTS

NOW YOU ARE GONE

Track-by-track

1. The Tiger Ballad 3.30

'Did you just say you love me, or was that the telly?'

The album opens with a single voice, because that’s what we’re here for - stories from the first person singular. The character in this song wants so desperately to hear a declaration of love that he can hear it in everyday things. The tiger is his fear, a fear of losing his lover.

2. Binary 4.04

'All or nothing, love, all for you'

Here the record goes up a gear with a menacing groove. In computer language, huge complexity is at its roots as simple as ones and zeroes. Binary was the first song Matt recorded on computer, and it remarks that humans being are so simple...and so complicated!

3. Second Heart 3.52

'Already gone, like an ice-sculpture-you in the sun'

Up a gear again, with a driving-away break-up song. If we don’t have enough room in our hearts for another person, can we grow another? Would having two hearts dilute the feelings, make them more tolerable? And to carry the binary theme over, at which point in a break-up is the lover gone, the one a zero? When they say it’s over, or when their car’s driving away? Or never?

4. Bubbles Of Nothing 3.30

'Your bum on the desk, the key to my heart'

Out of the fading loops at the breakdown of the break-up tune, a spicy office Tango. The response to loss of a deeply cherished love may be to seek something superficial, perhaps through work. That it’s meant to mean nothing, doesn’t mean it will cost nothing!

5. Paris, January 2.51

'We go so far to show ourselves how close we are'

After four tales of loss we needed relief - a simple crooner about the intimacy of long-distance travel, be it a new love met overseas, or a long-haul love on the move. The station noise could be Gare De Lyon... or Flinders Street?

6. The Jeweller 4.56

'She looked like I felt, and I felt like a drink, even sinking off Spain'

Carrying on the moving theme, The Jeweller launches into the journey-like second half of the record. It recalls the maritime evocations of the feminine in a womanless life - figureheads, sirens, the she-ness of ships, the weather, and the sea. This song was written coming home at 10,000m above the seas of Asia on September 10, 2001, and has become a live favourite.

7. Her Love 4.36

'Her heart is a minister, a head on the telly, for feelings that come from some other place'

The booms of the ship’s drum fade into a clatter of distant machinery. This song compares the plight of a rejected lover with that of an asylum seeker. Many performances on this album pit human against machine - listen for the bassist’s hairclip hitting the floor in the dying stages of the song, as she plays against the driving drum loop.

8. Charlotte Rose 3.16

'She only comes to see me when it snows'

The stark solo piano music is six years old, but the words are fresh. The theme of starvation of a woman’s love continues from The Jeweller and Her Love, this time in the setting of an English court of royalty from centuries ago. What stories do all those ancient portraits tell? Love has always found more ways to falter than survive...Listen for the more optimistic vocal contribution of a bird outside the piano room at the end.

9. Now You Are Gone 3.54

'I sense all that I sensed before, just less, now you are gone'

If there’s any comfort in loss, it might be that the feeling of loss tells you you had something worth having. You know the value of something. The music here was written to convey that comfort, despite the sadness of the words.

10. Boxing Day 5.22

'Somewhere it’s still yesterday...'

In clinical work you meet so many people who are disappointed, disenfranchised, dispirited. Life throws many people together that would be better off apart. On the train home from work you watch the silvers of the sky and grey suburbs and feel that serene ache, a day-after-Christmas feeling of having glimpsed that beauty rich and rare...which, like yesterday, is gone. But you saw it! And so you know, as the heaven-bound cycle of chords suggests, things can always get better. People heal.

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