Page 1 of 3

Matthew Ryan’s voice is the faint, gray light of pre-dawn.

There is clear evidence of recent darkness, yet a quiet moment be-fore day becomes opportunity for recovery and accep-tance. The title of Ryan’s 10th album, Matthew Ryan Vs. the Silver State, has con-notations of confron-tation, and the songs follow suit, laying down frustrating sto-ries of loss and pain. Yet from the opening rasp of “Dulce et De-corum Est,” Ryan’s throaty vocals hint that in the midst of contention he has found reconciliation, not a sense that things will get better, but that they are already good enough.

The Silver State is Ryan’s back-ing band, and together they have recorded an album on which every single song is very good and some are great. While the album’s title suggests the kind of infighting of Guns N Roses’s latter days, it is better a reflection of the push and pull between Ryan and producer

Doug Lancio. Lancio, (also guitarist for The Silver State), comes from the Daniel Lanois school of record producing: airy, ethereal, and plain-tive sounds juxtapose Ryan’s coarse vocals and acoustic guitars. “Jane, I

Still Feel the Same” sounds like a demo tape recorded in a kitchen late at night until two-thirds of the way through, when Lancio smooths the melancholy of the song with strings.

In fact, most of the album was recorded live with few over-dubs. Lancio, who produced Patty Grif-fin’s superlative 1,000 Kisses and lends his guitar sound to her work, uses strings, reverb, feedback, and

spacious synth to buttress what is in essence an extremely well-re-hearsed demo. For an apt example of Lancio’s signature sound listen to the guitar solo of “Closing In.” The entire album echoes the ten-sion between Ryan’s grit and Lan-cio’s polish, between the whiskey and the wine, between the mourn-ing and the dancing, always giving

Matthew RyanMatthew Ryan Vs. the Silver StateBy Chris Copeland

Page 2 of 3

the songs a glimpse of hope that somehow alights in the middle of the broken down lives of the char-acters that inhabit the album’s uni-verse (whether autobiographical or not, one senses a thread of personal history woven through the album).

It’s not that Matthew Ryan Vs. the Silver State (MRVSS) is a hopeful al-bum. In “Killing the Ghost” Ryan sings, “I will carve you from my life, couldn’t care less, I’m killing the ghost.” The al-bum is like an intense therapy session, an at-tempt to excise not his memories, but any re-sidual pain from those memories. Ironically, much of the sorrow comes from good memo-ries—Ryan seems less affected by sadness than by the loss of happi-ness. The aforementioned “Jane” remembers a redeeming relation-ship (“You were a good thing in a world gone wrong”) as does “Meet Me by the River” (“I recall watch-ing you walk down the aisle and I re-call how the flower girls made your mother smile, we used to smile”).

The closest the album comes to devolving into despair is the second track, “American Dirt,” on which

Ryan sings, “I crossed my fingers till they were broke, I threw a brick the arc formed so slow.” The track’s bass line is identical to U2’s “With or Without You.” By virtue of start-ing on the minor note in the scale though, “American Dirt” sounds tired, sad, and resigned where U2 sounds merely lovesick. The lyrics of “American Dirt offer some gor-

geous imagery (“A silver cross on tan, wet skin”), and Ryan delivers these lines with a sense of sorrow sans anger; the narrator of these songs has been put through the paces but refus-es to yield to senti-

ments that could easily break him.While the rest of the album re-

lates its fair share of misfortune, Ryan keeps himself on the periph-ery. In “They Were Wrong” Ry-an’s narrator asks someone, “Why would you ever live to wish and wait by the front door that your daddy never answered and your momma won’t any more?” Yet the narrator himself is not battered by parental ill treatment and serves as a sort of anchor: “I wish I’d known, maybe I could’ve helped you.” In fact, Ryan’s narrator seems to be the Tiresias of

The entire album echoes the tension between Ryan’s grit and Lancio’s polish.

Page 3 of 3

the working class: perpetual observ-er of the tragedies of others, suffer-ing at times from his own affliction, yet always the sage and a beacon of hope. Even in “Closing In” he ad-mits to being “lost and slow” and to having made mistakes. Yet even though “the hits come on still, one by one” and even with the possi-bility that “maybe we’ll never win” the singer’s resolution is “We’re closing in.” He ends the song with the admonition “Don’t be afraid.”

“It Could Have Been Worse” is the highlight of MRVSS. Ryan’s magnum opus of teen angst, the song becomes authentic tragedy when he delivers the dazzling line: “Her blond hair was a setting sun; her mascara was born to run.” Ry-ans uses second person throughout the song, skirting the typical teen-angst pitfall of giving weight to triv-ial, existential torment—by singing to someone else, Ryan essentially validates the difficulty of some lives without the “woe is me” sentiments of other, angsty writers (Ryan Ad-ams, to whom Ryan is inexorably compared, comes to mind). The song’s title suggests that even trag-edy is bearable. Perhaps this line best represents the unexpected glimmer of light in the album.

Even in the sadness that satu-rates the album, Ryan seems to be at peace. “Jane” doesn’t explain why the relationship faded; Ryan reflects only on the perfect vision of love in youth, noting that even maturity doesn’t make the naive sense of per-fection less perfect. In the opening song Ryan sings “When someone lets you down, you free fall to that bigger hand around your wrist.” A hand around a wrist could be a com-forting gesture or a confining one. It is this kind of lyrical nuance that places listeners in the tension of Ryan’s music. Somehow, the tone of the album suggests the former: gray light comes at morning and evening, but Ryan seems at home in the sunrise more than the im-pending heartbreak of dusk.