Matt Finish played at The Basement tonight and, courtesy of Rob Prior, myself, Boris, and some of Boris’ friends and co-workers came along for free.
Now, I’ve coded the Matt Finish site and have been working on a new version for them which should be easier for them to update… and I’ve heard the older Matt Finish tracks and even the newer version of their hit “Fade Away” and while it was catchy, I wouldn’t exactly say it was the best thing I’d heard.
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It was… and is… eighties rock… and not being someone who really lived through or with eighties rock… it’s not exactly my sort of thing.
But them playing eighties rock back then makes sense. [url=http://www.mattfinish.com.au/about.php]It was the eighties.[/url] That’s what people did in the eighties.
They also played [url=http://www.80smusiclyrics.com/games.shtml]Pacman and Pong[/url]. That’s probably a bad comparison though. Pacman and Pong rocked.
While I’m a child of the nineties (born in the eighties but wasn’t conscious for any of it), I actually do like some eighties music. For instance, Steve Winwood, Peter Gabriel, Phil Collins, Prince… they’re all examples of eighties musicians who I like and also happen to be great writers and musicians and singers and performers and whatnot. They’ve evolved with time and made music to match the modern take of music that the world has adopted. Other eighties artists like Michael Jackson (even for all the fucked up-ed-ness he’s gone through), Sting, U2, David Bowie, Madonna, Bjork (I’m not that much of a fan), Bon Jovi… these are all examples of artists whose music has changed over the years to reflect the times… and that’s what good music does. It changes with the people.
Now, I don’t know if I was attending a concert with the theme “Matt Finish Plays The Classics”, but if that’s what it was then that show wasn’t for me.
It wasn’t bad… no, not at all. Far from it. The band is good… the drummer — John Prior — is pretty good and the guitarists and bassist as well as the amount of them singing… they’re all capable and talented.
But the music hasn’t changed. What was once probably good in the eighties… what was one part of an eighties rock revolution with a sound wholly unique and different that the world was chiming into… is now dated.
What I heard was mediocre… and that’s a shame, especially since the band has talent and skill. While I understand that this three-gig tour was named after their original singer (who is now deceased) and I can obviously see from that the need to play older material, it had me wondering if all of the material… from their old material they’d played up to what I think was new material… was ever actually going to change…
Would any of it have a sort of sound that someone NOT familiar with the eighties… someone who didn’t care about the eighties or have a clue or care who or what a Matt Finish was… would any of their sounds have something in them for someone in-tune with today’s music?
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For me, it came out to be mediocre. I could enjoy the playing of the songs, but the songs became repetitive and dated and I just got bored of listening to them for over an hour that past the hour I stayed and tried shooting the band, I went out into the bar area near the door of The Basement and talked with Boris’ girlfriend.
As they were playing the second song of their encore, I went outside. Two hours of consistent eighties rock with little change can bare down on you.
Strangely, for a band with the word “finish” in the name, Matt Finish’s finishes in songs (the endings) seemed really lackluster compared to the confident and heroic sort of feel that the musicians played with. The endings usually felt empty compared to how the songs would begin. The new members were young but loved the music and the originals were happy to be playing again, and so the beginnings of the songs were filled with life… but the endings lacked something… and felt like someone hadn’t finished something properly.
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They’re great musicians, yes. And some of the material is good. Some of the riffs they play still work on today’s standards…
…but the overall standard of the music, song after song, feels more like someone trying to force the notion that the eighties are still here and that the sound hasn’t changed… and that just isn’t the case.