Matt Jones & The Reconstruction - Deep Enders -

Dodging wild pendulum swings 

It is futile now, to even try giving up that ghost, my friend.

 If you’ve got skeletons in your closet, you best teach them to dance.

“Mem-ory / wants / me / dead.” There’s such calm pacing to your singer’s delivery, the voice a thickened whisper over quavering strings, restless cellos, placid guitar strums.

Matt Jones picks up his guitar like an astral sword and wields the dull, hulking thing towards the neck of his nightmares; an aboutface, turning, back, back, back to the past, marching with it, speared over his head, to slay, to exorcise, to cast out…the darkest things… to (merely attempt) to deny his what he fears to be his destiny.

Oh, the heavy records and the beauty they bring. That feeling…when your eyes adjust to the midnight-black of a disparate wilderness., there’s illumination enough, here… submersing oneself into the cloudy bog of the past for a late summer’s swim; a pool made murky by your immortal mistakes, with bruise-tinted lilies floating atop eerily calm surface ripples that deceive the more furtive entities that burrow and snap their plaquey, creaky jaws throughout the darker streams toward the very bottom.

The Reconstruction’s orchestral arrangements, the bows upon cello, violin and bass, can rake with cathartic roughness, like scythes into webby grain; but then they can sooth with the next song’s more tranquil traipse. There’s an almost cinematic melodrama to the rustling tremolos building up into pretty lullaby-ish plumes of breathy choirs; there’s nostalgia to some of the folkishly curled melodies and radiance to the tones achieved on that reverb-flecked guitar intertwining with the ever-flickering fingerpick upon the acoustic guitar, there’s richness to the baroque-recalling accompaniment, these sumptuous, yet austere strings affecting an inevitable epic-ness, the soul-shaking reckoning that one only finds in the clarity of first light when that illusive sunlight you long for disintegrates a dream you’d been lost in for too long…

Imagery abounds, allegories to the civil war and torn photographs of taverns, history-book entries of ancestors whose faded-echo-heroism ever-shadows your poetic self-deprecation, the idealized love or loves of your life, your past lives, dancing and denting your memories as you try to mold them into a song that could be so sweet with its devastatingly beautiful melodies and precious pairings of crisp acoustics and sighing strings…. Could be sweet… could be surreal…

I’ve done enough writing…done enough talking to you about the ineffable sublimity of some of these songs…

Just listen: