It is with unbridled delight that I report:  The wondrous alchemy of The Fierce and the Dead is apparently fully compatible with ongoing servings of scrumptious solo work from guitarist Matt Stevens.

What occurs to me most immediately and forcefully is the word ‘LOOSED,’ though pronounced “loo-sid.”  Mere Matt Stevens is loosed upon the world, and one cares little as he begins to play whether there is a center that holds, or if it’s some kind of periphery without center along which we are careering.  To get loosed (loo-sid) is to be released.  The loosed and lucid journey is one on which I am willing to go, for I’ve come to know that I’m in good hands when he is at the helm.  (This is, at least in part, because he seems to know when NOT to steer.)

Lucidity is a kind of clearness.  It’s a kind of consciousness for which the object of consciousness is accessible, near rather than far (even when it’s neither here nor there).  Matt’s version of being lucid is not some algorithmic calculation that would still the rush of experience into a finalized stasis.  We begin with an ecstatic embrace of tension that is built into the very saying of it (“Oxymoron”), and many of the tracks keep the motifs of motion and journey in the foreground (“Flow,” “Unsettled”, “The Other Side,” “The Ascent,” “The Bridge).

But soon we find some kind of mystery in “Coulrophobia” (fear of clowns).  How strange, as I had not yet seen or heard this new disc when I wrote my last Look at The Lamb, where fearing clowns did come up, and where there was (among other things) some sort of plea that we NOT always insist on lucidity, at least in certain ways and in certain settings.  I get no sense here exactly what it is about clowns that one might fear, but I do get the sense that this (i.e., not having that sense) is exactly the locus of its power.

“The Bridge,” by being the longest of the tracks, presents itself as a kind of exclamation, asking to be heard “over and above” the other tracks, in some sense.  I hear it asking to be the key, as in a key to a map.  Hearing the whole disc through “The Bridge” is encountering an unabashed, loving commitment to composition, with few points for comparison in broadly “prog” music aside from Frank Zappa and Robert Fripp.  Like both, Matt will reliably entertain and amaze, but never at the cost of acting as midwife to the particular musical shape that is emerging in the clay on his wheel.  My second listen to the disc was sideways, first “The Bridge,” and then back out into the aural archipelago that surrounds it, as if they were destinations reached by crossing that Bridge.

(“KEA” and “The Boy” especially remind us what a cornucopia the acoustic guitar remains, despite its being so ubiquitous for decades in popular music.)

If we stay with that “sideways” direction of listening, then consider the title track as the final one.  Remember that we might use the word “lucid” not only to describe a way of being conscious from within, but also to mark the way in which the Other’s consciousness is there, is present, is detectable.  If a healthcare professional pronounces someone “lucid,” it is based on output, on performance.  Heard against the background of the entire disc, and as the answer to those exploratory questions, Matt’s answer is forthright and clear.  Though I’m no professional in these matters, I’m willing to make the pronouncement nonetheless:  Few guitarists, and indeed few musicians, are as completely and wonderfully musically lucid as Matt Stevens.

Get Lucid!

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