Syd Matters
Someday We Will Foresee Obstacles

THE REVIEW

If you don't know French, or if you only know words like "madame" and "trezeguet", entering any record store in Paris and trying to explain to the clerk that you're interested in buying "a record by some alternative French artist" can be a daunting task. Then it happens that, on the umpteenth attempt, you're served by a beautiful girl wearing an equally beautiful Pantera t-shirt, and at that point, you feel a bit closer to the goal and let slip a risky suggestion like "I'd like something... like Radiohead"...

Here it is! Syd Matters, with his second official album after "A Whisper And A Sigh" from 2003, "the bridge between Nick Drake, Radiohead, and Robert Wyatt" as I read somewhere I no longer remember. With my doubts (if Matters is a bridge, Wyatt is the Great Wall of China crossing the late twentieth century) I face the twelve tracks that make up the album and all in all, I find that Matters might be right, that one day we will be able to foresee the difficulties and perhaps we will overcome them with the tranquility that his music instills in us, with the clarity of his arrangements. It's as if Thom Yorke stopped being paranoid, personally, I would be much more at peace with the world.

Sure, I didn't find the "downward spiral" of the French underground, as I might have hoped, but I discovered a sincere artist, who has the gift of moderation and calmness, perhaps not a compositional talent but certainly a refined ear, halfway between the immediacy of folk singers and the refinements of modern electronic productions.