Spectral Sound
2003
Leave Luck To Heaven
About This Album
A Jabberjaw 12" on Perlon, a False compilation on Plus 8, two EPs on Spectral Sound, and now this. An album with a title worthy of Douglas Sirk -- or perhaps a rough English translation of the name of a Japanese video-game company -- Leave Luck to Heaven indicates that Matthew Dear was saving the best of his 2003 artillery for the end of the year. Formatted like a pop record intended for home listening, with most tracks falling somewhere in the four- to five-minute range, Leave Luck to Heaven has a flow unlike any other single-artist microhouse album to date. This is far from a handful of dancefloor-intended tracks apprehensively slapped onto a disc for a more private form of consumption. Vocal tracks -- whether containing verses and choruses or samples reduced to vapor -- are as common as instrumentals, and for every track with a 4/4 foundation, there's an upbeat pop song based around a sharp keyboard melody. "Dog Days" is where it all peaks, falling somewhere between the two approaches to devastating effect. No micro-pop-house single is as singsongy, as loose in the limbs, as springboard buoyant; Dear's baritone, followed tightly by his near-falsetto, rides the contours of a mass of wriggling keyboard tendrils, stabs of synthetic trumpet, an attenuated millisyllable ground into hiccups, and a rhythm that swings with a periodic Teutonic jack.
Track List (try tracks 2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 and 10)

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