Matthew Friedberger
Matricidal Sons Of Bitches
Release Date: Oct 30, 2012
Genre(s): Pop/Rock
Record label: Thrill Jockey
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Album Review: Matricidal Sons Of Bitches by Matthew Friedberger
Average, Based on 5 Critics
Based on rating 3/5
Matthew Friedberger is easily one of the most challenging figures in contemporary indie rock. Though his music as the Fiery Furnaces (with his sister, Eleanor, on vocals) is full of disjointed and surrealistic concepts, that band is a walk in the park compared to his solo work. Hot on the heels of an eight-album series released throughout 2011 and 2012, the prolific Paris-based Friedberger now gives us Matricidal Sons Of Bitches, 45 instrumental tracks influenced by the low-budget films of Poverty Row.
Based on rating 6/10
After releasing the Solos series of albums, which focused on exploring the musical possibilities of a single instrument on each release, Matthew Friedberger got the band back together for Matricidal Sons of Bitches, a smaller but just as high-concept project: A soundtrack to an imaginary horror film in four distinct parts. Given the willfully obscure bent of much of his work outside the Fiery Furnaces, it's somehow apt that while this is the most widely available music Friedberger has made in some time, it's also some of his least accessible. He's completely dedicated to the soundtrack concept, turning in an entirely instrumental album that breaks up its suites into smaller movements -- 45 in all -- that are subtle variations on the themes he sets forth.
Based on rating 4.9/10
"Matthew Friedberger requests fan's screenplays and videos," went an email promoting one of the multimedia aspects of Friedberger's latest solo venture, the 45-track "opera" that is Matricidal Sons of Bitches. That misplaced apostrophe accidentally says an awful lot: Since the Fiery Furnaces released I'm Going Away in 2009, their most accessible album to date, Matthew Friedberger hasn't exactly been on a charm offensive. He entered into a bizarre, one-sided, and intolerably lengthy internet fight with Thom Yorke and Beck, and between January 2011 and January 2012, released eight solo records, each performed on a single instrument in order to demonstrate the "Cretan-Lacedaemonian principle," where "every group of instruments is against every other group of instruments, every instrument is against every other instrument, and, finally, every instrument is against itself.
Based on rating 2/10
The opening strains of Matthew Friedberger’s latest solo album are profoundly and cruelly misleading. But with a title like Matricidal Sons of Bitches and a 45-song track list of diminishing returns, one wonders whether the arousal of rancor is the whole point of this particular exercise. There was a time (the half decade from 2004-2009, to be exact) when Matthew Friedberger could do no wrong, musically speaking.
Opinion: Fairly Good
Matthew Friedberger’s music has always bordered on the nonsensical. As half of Fiery Furnaces with sister Eleanor, he wrote music with his grandmother, recorded tracks backwards and made an album about a blueberry-loaded boat.Solo, he’s even more peculiar. See 2006’s ‘Holy Ghost Language School’ for example: half of a double release, it tells the story of a a man opening a foreign language school in order to do business in China.
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