VF14 2014 / Think Like A Key 2025
Is The Matador
“Please don’t encourage me, light of day”: Californian bull(shit)fighter brings back his obscure psychedelic drama.
When it’s not used in a wrong way, weirdness is a warm gun, because it gives a person quite a few creative liberties and licenses, and at least one Los Angeles dweller has always known how to properly wield such a weapon. He’s still deploying artistic arms, as 2024’s "Here Come The Dowsers" showed in style, yet, focused on Hollywood, that album reminded this musician of another of his works, “Ward White Is The Matador” from 2014, which was titled after a line from a 1964 film, so there’s a lot of anniversaries involved here. A bit overwhelming, the devil’s dozen songs on offer, plus a theatre-of-the-absurd play extending the original record by half, but the amount of intimate details in Ward’s pieces, on lyrical level and in the arrangements, will render White’s forgotten gem arresting again.
From quasi-rhetorical questions of the thrumming “Sabbath” – the platter’s opener where brief riffs offset the singer’s falsetto, catchy choruses take universal grievances to dancefloor, and pseudo-brass licks radiate psych-rapture – onwards, to the short serenade “Salvaged Rose” with its acoustic strum at the fore, verbal and melodic quirks are abundant on this album. However, if some of the songs on display seem deliberately designed as strange, and calamitous in a guitar department, “Tumble” rocks hard and demonstrates enviable abandon, as Wards’ demons assault his ’60s-flavored tunes, and while “Alphabet Of Pain” streams heartfelt, strings-drenched balladry, the majestic “Balloon” soars even higher on the wings of White’s observations. So though the piano-sprinkled “Chiquita” upgrades the agenda of a certain Swedish foursome, and the cosmically thumping “Drive-Thru” pays tribute to the “Ashes To Ashes”-era Bowie, the exquisite “Dia Luna” and “Rash” find the warbler in an operatic mode, and “I’ll Make It Up To You” attached baroque curlicues and raucous twang to pop figures.
It’s impossible not to get pulled into the horror-comical catastrophe of “Reprieve” that starts with the “The trouble began when we encountered the van of the woman who slapped my face” gambit, but the brilliant “Dolores On The Dotted Line” explores a bluesy route of a Southern stripe. And then there’s the 20-minute bonus extravaganza “The Olde Days” that wanders beyond mere bizarreness and directs the listener towards Wonderlandesque lunacy, with Ward’s multiple-voice reminiscences, and nostalgia channeled mostly through spoken word and occasional expletive outcry, meeting the ever-shifting, “Strawberry Field”-like instrumental backdrop. Added to the album, this expansive East Coast adventure, which actually refers to its title – as the solemn, orchestrally elevated “Bikini” did earlier – and asks a few more questions, reflects on the past in a different light.
Not rose-tinted, but outrageously bloody-red, “Is The Matador” is as titillating, and scintillating, as it gets.
*****
