Syd Matters is a Frenchman who makes post-Radiohead singer-songwriter mope music, with electronics and alienation smoothly incorporated into acoustic melancholia, and he makes it uncommonly well. His self-titled U.S. debut is consistently impressive, but I particularly like “Passe Muraille,” which opens with a few minutes of beautifully unsettling guitar and electronics atmospherics before falling into a simple repeated melody, somewhere between a hymn and a children’s nursery rhyme.
— T.B.
