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 Caught in the Carousel - Music Reviews and More
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Mattheah Baim
Laughing Boy
Dicristina
"Music is catching up to me," sings Matthea Baim on her sophomore album Laughing Boy. Although an artist can't outrun the medium in which they operate, Baim is certainly making it an interesting footrace. A former member of the much-missed Metallic Falcons, Baim's solo work is moody, dark and wondrous. "He Turned My Mind Around" is a macabre, slow motion march; "Pagoda" is as still and spare as they come and the melodic "Birthday" finds Baim suggesting "Upside down the moon looks lost." Although Baim's delivery has a kind of forlorn distance to it, this remains an intimate, albeit slightly haunted collection. The arrangements suggest a barren Midwestern field covered in fog and murk, but Baim beams her way through with an understated hazy confidence. Elsewhere, there's the gothic folk of "Monkey Chant"; "Orange Juice Guitar" has some dark, dreamy angles and "Big Cat" finds Baim mournfully claiming she has, "gone away, gone away, gone away." In fact, the sentiment of the latter perfectly captures the charm of this Milwaukee native: She likes to start far away and then walk her way back slowly through a song. It's an effective technique, and one so solitary and spare, it evokes the work of Edward Hopper, where people sit on stairs, sink into sailboats and slouch on sidewalks staring down the big fear and the ineffable chasms of the universe, all by themselves. Baim's the same way—her wonderful backing band aside, she rises above the compositions and by the end it feels like she's' returned from somewhere spectral, somewhere in the void that "sits behind its microphone."
—Alex Green
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