Review Summary: Comfort in simplicity
About a minute into opener 'Revenge', Matthew Pryor asks through gritted teeth
'how do you sleep at night?' and he sounds in equal measures scared to death and resilient. It's the first subtle, gorgeous scratch of a record that lives off the same type of understated moment. In a similar fashion to subdued masterpieces like The National's
Alligator,
At The Foot Of My Rival gently nudges you through the morning crowds, content to sit just out of the immediate foreground of a painting comprising largely sepia tones and hazy outlines. Intimate, analogue recordings and poignant, searching lyricism abound, but practically nothing is dramatic.
Rival's intention is not to provide bouncy relief from life's difficult subplots, but to offer a safety net to fall back into, and it does that perfectly.
As you'd expect, then, there are no synths or guitar solos to be found in these 14 folk-pop whisps, and very few plugged-in instruments in general. Very few tracks venture into electric territory, and even then they're beautifully restrained, with 'Fountain Of Youth''s sparse guitar line half giving way to the shadow of a harmonica in its bridge; mouth organs are scattered liberally throughout the record, too, in all manner of contexts, even providing a considerable amount of the foundations for 'Lost Long Shot'. But The New Amsterdams never force these things into the spotlight, preferring the calm and indirect approach. Indeed, the single most arresting track on the record is 'Hughes', a simple song based around a frighteningly simple acoustic guitar and a very raw acoustic recording style complete with soft background static.
That cut's killer line -
'people are misplaced, people are full of shit' - is also arguably the album's best lyrical soundbite. Pryor isn't an attention-seeking songwriter; it's unlikely many will ever argue for his status as more than an honest, intriguing lyricist. But the proficiency with which he untangles the complicated threads of heartbreaking and difficult situations merits a huge degree of appreciation; that the band he fronts is capable of matching that modus operandi so consistently also helps a great deal. There are numerous songs here about divorce and break-ups in general, all of which seem rooted in uncertainty and the struggle to understand why things can't be so much easier, and
Rival as a whole follows this trend, offering a document of complex emotional states for you to underline as you see fit.
It's difficult to use superlatives to describe
At The Foot Of My Rival without feeling like you're actually doing it a disservice. It's by no stretch of the imagination the best record ever released; there's no sort of technical brilliance in the straightforward guitar lines or Pryor's conversational delivery, and it doesn't truly aspire to anything beyond a collection of excellent, mellow songs. In all honesty, though, it doesn't have to. Like the best albums, it's capable of altering your mood in a certain manner, just much less drastically than most. Yeah, it's not going to transform the world before your eyes, but sometimes you just need a record to understand exactly how you're thinking and not p
iss you off, and that's why
At The Foot Of My Rival means so much more than it was probably ever meant to.
