The Depths of Amorous Avidity
Matt Maltese's new album Hers is languid, lovelorn poetry, like a bit of Marcel Proust for the 21st century.
Dainty, naked legs rise against a cappuccino-colored wall beside a floppy-haired young man, his loose-collared sweater echoing the softness of the scene. Arresting as the cover image of Matt Maltese’s new album Hers is, it manages to convey comfortable intimacy without the saccharine, over-sexualized emptiness that often parades as art today. The photo fits the bill. With its poetic takes on love, found and lost, Hers is like the hug of a thoughtful friend on your rainy day.
Yet, apt for an album the first track of which is “Arthouse Cinema,” its lush arrangements and off-kilter wit are refreshingly cinematic. Breathy clarinet and billowing vibraphone open the album, evoking an idealized Parisian scene—one far removed from the “grey, inhumane, sad city” Agnès Varda once described. Her name (the first lyrics on the album) appears here alongside those of a handful of other artists of the silver screen, bringing believability to this quirky vignette of a film addict who laments: “Such a cliché I became.” Yet, although Maltese here concludes that “arthouse cinema won’t save you,” the song is still a fitting tribute to the cathartic nature of good art, with the touching lines:
They say that no one hears you scream out in space, well
At the pictures, no one hears you sob and sob and sob
Lyrically, “Buses Replace Trains” is one of the happiest moments on Hers, though its descending melodic motif and wobbly, modulated keyboards keep it within the same melancholic sphere as the rest of the album. In his signature pillowy calm, Maltese sings such pretty professions of love as “Forever is too short, I wanna make love in the afterlife”—and, drawing our eyes back to the album art:
Every single morning, you wrap (you wrap) your legs around mine
And satellites light above, mythological creatures run
Just to catch a glimpse of her
In a psychological sense, Hers is all down from here. It’s true, as Maltese sings on “Pined for You My Whole Life,” that he “should get a PHD in yearning.” Laced with gems expressing the depths of amorous avidity, the remainder of the album explores different takes on the subject of unanswered affection. The most imaginative of these pining portraits are “Happy Birthday” (the concept more than the self-destruction it catalogs) and—my personal favorite for lyrical inventiveness—“Anytime, Anyplace, Anyhow.” Its chorus offers the album’s most piercing portrayal of psychological addiction to a lost love:
Anytime, anyplace, anyhow
You’re allowed to call me to your hotel suite
I don’t care who you’re with or where you've been
Anytime, anyplace, anyhow
You’re allowed to treat me like a piece of meat
I don’t care if it’s been a year or if it’s been 16
To mean it, of course, is to trample one’s own dignity—but it’s a feeling most have experienced at some point. And anyone in the midst of such insatiable infatuation can lean on Maltese’s beautiful encapsulation. So often, what we need to get past emotional trauma is simply to look it in the eye. And that’s much easier when we can set our tangled emotions right in front of us, thanks to an artist who’s objectified similar experiences in the form of an artwork we can reflect upon.
Still, obviously, the less one needs of that sort of medicine, the better.
On that note, one might consider “Always Some MF” a bit of a thematic outlier—which the album could use more of, both in subject and in sonic variety. But it’s not. It treats the same theme as “Tangled”—
I love you so, he loves you too, you love us both
Now our hearts are truly tangled
—with a slightly firmer stance. Yet, one could hardly imagine a more serene-sounding, disarmingly gentle expression of the idea that “There’s always some motherfucker, seeking the affection of my girl.”
On the whole, Hers is languid, lovelorn poetry, like a bit of Marcel Proust for the 21st century. It makes for gorgeous rainy-day music, pitter pattering between scenes of longing, occasionally delighting in the puddle of a gorgeous metaphor. Enjoy responsibly. As with all emotional medicine, the poison is in the dosage.