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Mattress

by Cuticles

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track # 1 off 18 track Siltbreeze album Major Works siltbreeze.bandcamp.com/album/cuticles-major-works-lp

Can also purchase real live actual lps there

REVIEW OF ‘MAJOR WORKS’ BY THE CUTICLES
Maryann Savage

The Cuticles come from Oamaru - the kind of place where they have to wait for another band to pass through town so that they have someone to play with. Matt Plunkett wrote most of the lyrics on their new album ‘Major Works’, but the other band members make a big contribution to the sound. Lisa Preston’s backing vocals provide a layer of humour, aggravation and buzzing harmony that is just as charming as Matt’s. Lisa’s song, ‘Rabbit Fur Lined Glove’, has great lyrics and her keyboard in ‘Radio Hams’ is broad, echoing, and attention grabbing. The chorus of voices in ‘Gasp Aghast’ takes the seasick lurching quality of the rest of the
album to its appropriate conclusion.

But the sensibility that dominates the band is clearly Matt’s. His socially awkward ranting, the frustration and nitpicking, bring to mind other obvious masters of the ‘underground man’ form, like the Sleaford Mods or The Fall. The Cuticles are completely non-derivative, however; they are far too defiantly unfashionable to be anything other than sui generis. Matt’s irritations are all his own.

A lot of those irritations involve social awkwardness. Matt sings about the‘Facebook guy’ that came over to his house to play cards, and the uncomfortable meeting that ensued. He’s obviously trying hard to crack the code of these little social interactions - and this anguish is so much more real than the played out emotions of popular music. In ‘Holiday Cracks’ he complains that it ‘never really feels like the right time to interject’. I can vouch that I have personally seen Matt
unable to interject, opening his mouth and being cut off before he can sayanything.It’s all true! And everyone can identify with the grouchy disappointment of a holiday not being quite right.

The way Matt sticks to the surface makes you think that there is a lot that isn’t said. He sings about driving around with his Dad, but what isn’t spoken? What does he really think of his Dad? There’s something underneath, but he’s too self-effacing to say. This is an anguish that seems to drive a lot of punk music: all the pain of not being able to say what you really think, driving piercing guitars and a stifled, anguished voice. We’re not living in the Renaissance, or even the Romantic era, when you could just tell someone you loved them, or cry: the facetiously archaic title of “I know not what …” despondently evokes the wry crumbling remains of one’s English degree. What’s the point of being a pure hearted knight in this slough of memes?

This is an album without big themes, defined by minutiae; by literally small things, like trying to find feathers - feathers that evade you. In ‘Democracy or Dictatorship’, you would think you were going to encounter some big issues, but the lyrics are about walking around in cheap slacks. ‘Steal my Statue’ is about small disputes between neighbours, where you never actually do anything, but you lie awake at night, thinking about how you’d like to scratch your neighbour’s windscreen. The sensibility is self effacing and slightly grouchy - nothing is ever found. Nothing goes quite right. It wouldn’t be funny if it did. It wouldn’t be bathos.

And that’s the thing: Matt is droll, and warm, precisely because he isn’t some grandiose phony. The music is an appropriately swirling, cosy, comfortable noise.If you listen to this and think Matt sounds like the kind of person who would be a great friend - well, yes, he is. He’s funny: he writes about ‘falling in love with a mattress’ and catches the humour of other people’s self importance: ‘I am a top rated architect. I am the best around’. He lets other people’s own stupidity expose them, like Nathan Fielder or Ricky Gervais. You can’t be funnier than reality.

This is true punk, in which lacking pretension is the purpose and the meaning. Stripping away social form and artistic polish leaves the only artifice remaining an attempt at honesty. There are eighteen songs on this album, but many of them are very short, little fragments, like gems you stumble over one after another -they’re dusty, but still beautiful. And they’re short, because no-one so humble would ever outstay his welcome.

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released September 28, 2023

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Cuticles Oamaru, New Zealand

formed 2020 in Oamaru staving off

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