Singer-songwriter Matt Simons shares After The Landslide, his third full-length album since 2014’s breakthrough hit Catch and Release.
Throughout the twelve new tracks, and a collage-like new video for the first single “Open Up,” Simons explores youthful love and growing up with a nostalgia-tinged pop that manages to be as wistful as it is engaging.
Simons runs the emotional gamut on
After The Landslide, pulling from his memory to carry him into the present. The “Night Moves”-like songs, “Made It Out Alright” and “Summer with You” open the album, warmly retelling stories of furtive first love, transitioning into the bitter breakup tracks “It’s You” and “Not Falling Apart.” The album feels as though Simons is consciously tracing the paths his life has taken for the listener, questioning how he became the person that he is now. Simons understands the past, with heartbreaking sonic clarity, as something he can never return to: “Dust,” his softly-unraveling duet with Betty Who, embodies the pain of this truth in the form of a late-night-drunk call to someone he once loved. But it’s to the album’s credit that looking to the past never becomes a sad obsession: After The Landslide marks the passage of time as a celebration, employing strains of folk and soul in his pop to take joy in growing older, in what and how he’s learned.
“I’m gonna see what’s left after the landslide,” Simons promises on the title track. The album is dedicated, genuinely and unpretentiously, to making the most out of a life-so-far, and it’s far better this way—for the listener, and Matt Simons himself.
Matthew Apadula is a writer and music critic from New York. His work has previously appeared on GIGsoup Music and in Drunk in a Midnight Choir. Find him on Twitter @imdoingmybest.
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