Albums : Phosphorescent : Muchacho

Albums : Phosphorescent : Muchacho

Listen To Phosphorescent : Muchacho

Who Is Phosphorescent?
Matthew Houck likes to work. The Alabama native, now resident in Brooklyn has delivered five albums as Phosphorescent since his 2003 debut. Houck has a highly distinctive artistic voice and a refreshing, rolled-sleeves approach to his expression. 2007's Pride – a delicate and haunting work of ragged country and bittersweet gospel – first caused ears to swivel in Phosphorescent's direction. He followed it with To Willie, a tribute to Willie Nelson, then 2010's Here's To Taking It Easy, an enthusiastic plunge into country rock and Americana. Now, his sixth album Muchacho flashes yet another color in the subtly shifting Phosphorescent spectrum.

Muchacho reprises the understated melancholia and sensuous minimalism of Pride, while kicking up a little of Here's To Taking It Easy's dust, but it also strikes out into more adventurous waters via rhythm and electronic textures. It took shape partly as a result of events beyond Houck's control. After spending the best part of 18 months touring his last record, Houck was, in his words "pretty fried." He returned to the Brooklyn Navy Yard studio where he'd recorded his previous two albums, planning "on taking this whole thing down a few notches. I wanted to make music," he explains, "but I was weary, so the spectre of putting anything out and getting back on the road was a bit of a block." He bought a load of old analog gear and "just starting playing around with it, making these noises. They weren't songs, they were just strange sound pieces. I've always had that element in my work, and one or two weird, ambient pieces seem to squeeze themselves onto every record, but suddenly I was doing a lot of those."

The singer says, "This time, I was getting really excited about the experimental sounds I was making. I was thinking I might make an ambient record that had vocals, but no lyrics. I was actually considering releasing it under another name." Exactly as 2012 turned, Houck's life began to unravel. A domestic crisis meant he had to find another apartment/studio at short notice, in the dead of winter. His life was falling apart, but almost perversely, "songs just started happening, and there were five or six of them." Houck admits he was "in the middle of a bit of a freak-out," so in the small hours one Sunday, he booked a ticket to Mexico, on a plane that was leaving three hours later. "It sounds really cheesy, but I went down there with a guitar and got a little hut on the beach in Tulum, on the Yucatan Peninsula." After a week there working to finish the songs that would become Muchacho, he went back to NYC, found a new place, fitted it out and began tracking the record in May 2012.

'Muchacho's Tune' – with its opening braid of twanging guitars, piano and electric keys, its warm, rich reverb and poignant mariachi brass – is the song on which the album turns. This was the first song to come to him fully formed, and it establishes the album's lyrical theme – "that the possibility of redemption through love and romance is not just hopeful, it's also viable. It definitely exists. But what ends up happening is more redemption through some vague means that I don't really understand." It's indicative of Houck's distinctive talent, dedication to his work and trust in his muse, then, that a temporary hurdle didn't become a serious block. "I got clear of it by just getting to work on the recording," he says, simply. Sleeves rolled. Resolve fixed. Muchacho delivered.

Muchacho Review
When Phosphorescent's Matthew Houck came off the road in support of his last album, 2010's Here's to Taking it Easy, he was mentally and physically exhausted, uncertain he wanted to make another Phosphorescent record. So he dispatched himself to Tulum, a small community in Mexico, where, he said, "I just checked out of my life for a while." As he took long solitary walks in the woods and swam, the pieces of what would become Muchacho began taking shape in his mind.

As with everything Houck does as Phosphorescent, from 2007's urban-rustic classic Pride to his 2009 Willie Nelson tribute record, this little story has an endearingly second-hand ring to it, as if Houck was obediently following the dictates of some dog-eared country-drifter playbook tucked in his back pocket. But this credulousness is also key to his music, which glows with simple reverence and purity. On Muchacho, Houck gathers together everything he's attempted-- beery, rollicking country-rock, haunted tribal hymnals, regret-soaked bar room heartbreak-- and fashions it into something close to a defining statement.

The first layer of Muchacho to savor is the simple gloriousness of its sound. Houck records his music largely alone, bringing in key players for individual parts but crafting the end results meticulously, in isolation. With the assistance of engineer John Agnello (Kurt Vile, Male Bonding), he has produced a bright, rich, warmly three-dimensional record, one that fuses the headed-for-the-big-city bar-rock signifiers of Here's to Taking it Easy with the night-sky awe of his earliest work. In fact, the album feels like a daylight version of Pride, a point hammered home by the contrast between that album's "Be Dark Night" and this one's two book-ending hymnals.

Accordingly, listening to Muchacho often feels like being warmed by afternoon sun as it floods your window. Every sound is lovingly recorded and given a cradle of space: The rounded pop of the drum track on "Terror in the Canyons (The Wounded Master)", paired with tumbles of upright piano and softly pattering bongos; the dryly whispering bowed harmonics that open "A Charm/A Blade"; the mournful little mariachi trumpet solo winding through the country waltz of "Down to Go". The first thing we hear on the record, introducing the opening "Sun" hymnal, is a dreamlike, welcoming major-key synth flutter. Those synths reappear on "Song For Zula", mingling with crystalline threads of pedal steel guitar, lifting country's signature instrument further heavenward.

At the center of all these majestic noises sits Houck himself. His voice is an unreliable instrument-- reedy, hiccuping, prone to cutting out entirely mid-note-- but he plies it heartbreakingly, never more than on Muchacho. On "Sun, Arise!" and "A New Anhedonia", he stacks himself into massed, keening layers, like a church full of choirboys. It’s a technique that he’s used before, but he has never sounded as overwhelming as he does here. The persistent catch in his voice, meanwhile gives him an unstable, baby chick fragility, magnifying the pathos of a line like, "See honey I am not some broken thing/ I do not lay here in the dark waiting for thee" from "Song For Zula".

One of Muchacho's main thematic concerns is redemption, and it’s one Houck explores with his customary ringing, allegorical language. Sometimes his writing grows so high-flown that it eludes sense: "I was the wounded master, and I was the slave… I was the holy lion, and I was the cage/ I was the bleeding actor, and I was the stage," he sings on "Terror in the Canyons (The Wounded Master)". More straightforward is this, from "Muchacho’s Tune": "See I was slow to understand/ This river’s bigger than I am/ It’s running faster than I can, though lord I tried." It’s a simple sentiment, pitched somewhere south of Zen koan and just north of heartland-rock cliche, and it maps out the coordinates of Houck’s world: It’s a place where well-worn sounds are the most beloved, where ideas and poses are settled into like old chairs. On Muchacho, Houck invests this world with new beauty and profundity.


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