Spectreview: Matmos – Plastic Anniversary

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Hooray, conceptual art! Good ol’ mentally-stimulating, questionably-pretentious, kind-of-awe-inspiring conceptual art. Matmos are kings of this, and they’ve been in the business since the late 90’s, using everything from washing machines to old American instruments to cow uteri in their album-length examinations of modern social structures. You can see why Björk found a common spirit in them around the Vespertine-era: the duo aim to approach human behavior as outsiders, aliens who have nothing to go on but the things we surround ourselves with. This intrepidness continues on their newest release, Plastic Anniversary, an album recorded almost entirely on plastic objects.

You can probably already read into the implications of this concept. Plastic has been integrated so deeply into our lives that we’ve undoubtedly taken it for granted; yet while it’s inarguably one of humanity’s grandest technological accomplishments, it’s been disastrous to the environment and an ultimate accelerator of our eventual extinction. The band explore multiple sides of its role in human life, from the violence resulting from military R&D (the propulsive, tribal “Thermoplastic Riot Shield”) to the mood-morphing effects of medication (“The Crying Pill”) to the dirge-leaning celebration of trash collection (“Fanfare for Polyethlene Waste Containers”). True to their experience as experimental artists, they integrate plastic seamlessly, with an unsurprising focus on percussion. The full, cavernous sounds of buckets, the pop of cups, the bright pulse of springs and fine-toothed combs all come together in a blessedly accessible way. They manage to construct whole worlds with these sounds, building to the climactic “Collapse of the Fourth Kingdom,” which plays like a town festival struck by a meteor. Overall it does comes across a little more high-concept than high-entertainment, but with such an audacious idea it’s wonder enough that Matmos was able to give such lifeless entities a collectively potent vibrancy.

Recommended for listening while in the ball pit of a McDonald’s Playplace.