Matt Ward
End Of Amnesia

The search for an unreviewed-to-give-5 leads me to Portland, 5 years ago.

Back then and there, Matt (known to his friends as M) Ward signs what is already by the title his masterpiece. I won't speak of his musical matrix, which takes root among Will Oldham, Califone, or especially the Giant Sand of Howe Gelb (his partner in crime), nor will I say that listening to it is like a journey in a stagecoach from the Western frontier at dusk through folk, pop, country, and who knows what else.

I prefer to write a few lines, no more, without external links, out of respect for the obsessive intimacy of an album that, after all, is in a league of its own. What can I say, this man plays guitar and sings, and he does it in an intoxicating way.
The sounds are warm and bare, the voice saturates every crack in that high and slightly breezy room where "End of Amnesia" should be listened to.

The first track unfolds around one of the most heart-wrenching guitar phrases of the last centuries, initiating the placid listener to even more placid suggestions that symmetrically exhaust themselves in the concluding Nocturne. A wonder, truly.
The sense of nakedness is such that it almost leads to modesty, the sounds are very low fidelity, the voice is decidedly complicit in the misdeed. The strings seem stripped as well, imperfect.

An elegy of weakness, of existential fragility, tempered by the solemn levity of the melodies, which between psalms and bad dreams let the event flow seemingly painlessly. But M. Ward scratches you, marks you irreparably, and you realize it even 5 years later, at the end of Amnesia.