Review Summary: it ain't the alcohol, it's kismet
A perfumed-armpit jazz lounge and its cigarette butt and trodden-in gum confetti lauds the marriage between the gaudy, short crooner and the almost empty seats in front of him. The limp wrists, imperfectly framed in an ill-fitting, sequinned two-piece suit. The winks, the salacious nods of the head, the matted chest. Commanding the kerb-high stage, he spills his vows all down himself. Nobody in attendance would much care for his dulcet, world-weary lamentables - but then, nobody is paying attention; save for the corner’s corrugated seventy-something who imparts a couple of dusty claps in between songs. Matt Maltese steps clumsily from his platform, Vans in place of spats, and lumbers towards the bar.
On Bad Contestant, Matt Maltese as this brand of wayward club singer is the perfectly puerile manifestation of our sicklier selves. He dishes out damning, but syrupy, indignations that glint with discrete self-deprecation. These diatribes are veneered in much the same way as the lounge where he resides; rather than an on-the-nose bemoaning of ineligible bachelors, he’s deft and reasonable in his approach. He swaps out the essay-writing of one Mr. Tillman and doubles down on the schmaltz, playful as he pokes fun at himself, the doting C-tier metrosexual and his valiant, feckless peacock strutting. “I ain’t much, but baby I could impress ya,” he coos, looking more like a pigeon pecking at a bottle cap.
Bad Contestant administers its character in the same way a patch does nicotine, the equal parts droll quips and charming musical backdrop being released at regular intervals and entering the bloodstream. Maltese sings with power and presence, like Sinatra does on his aptly-titled ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’, but faces his romantic woes with the mawkish tact of Leisure Suit Larry - “I’d go home with the lowest prize on TV,” he gleans on the title track. “You can find me finishing off the empties.” It’s a delightful disparity – like Irn Bru served in a champagne flute.
These delicious witticisms are in steady supply, but this record is made much more than the sum of its parts by clever moments inside the actual instrumentation. Take album standout ‘Like A Fish’, wherein Maltese takes envious umbrage with a courting competitor. In its bridge, Maltese seems pleased with himself as he delivers the joke, “I wish that I could fill his shoes, but I’m only a 7”. Behind him, a descending scale of staccato strings, the sort that might accompany a Hanna Barbera bad guy falling down a flight of stairs. There’s ‘Nightclub Love’, in which he fawns over a (perhaps imagined) conquest. “How about I run you a bath﹖” he suggests, and his internal monologue backing vocals add “I don’t take baths often” with a wry raised eyebrow – which is ironic, seeing as in Bad Contestant’s back half, he seems to want to wash himself of his hapless antics. For a spell, he puts the laughs on hold, giving his best vocal performance as he mourns an old flame that is slipping from his memory on ‘Less and Less’, then back-pedals slightly on the moody ‘Misery’ - “I saved a message to my telephone: no-one wants to hear your misery, they got their own.” So he pockets it.
‘Guilty’ is a splash of cold water to the face, a f
uck-it adjustment, as Maltese decides to just delight in his seedy ways after bedding a betrothed. He too-proudly admits “I tried horse tranquilliser just to impress her,” before sentencing himself - “I had a choice, and I chose guilty, baby!” And with the deprecation turned to revelation, Bad Contestant culminates with a double whammy of hammy melodrama. On ‘As The World Caves In’, Maltese chooses a sweetheart to nestle with and watch the apocalypse, and the closing ‘Mortals’ muses on the fallout. “Maybe we’d have hit it off if old Mother Earth hadn’t got so hot,” he shrugs, still fixated on unrequited love, convinced that it’s definitely divine intervention that has hindered his advances.
He wraps up his miniature odyssey in the most grandiose way he can, zooming out from a human scale to a cosmic one, but the dust settles and he’s still just a half-pint. He finishes a cranberry vodka, wipes his mouth on his sparkling sleeve, saunters out of the lounge and falls into the same taxi as the next love of his life.
