Disappearances by Matthew Connor

Places of disappearance are pervaded by a sense of mystery and melancholy. Think of moonlight shivering over stalks of wheat. Trees in the forest crosshatching into new unreadable black metal band logos. Floorboards in an old house weeping in the most abandoned keys. This is the kind of scenery that Matthew Connor’s new album, Disappearances, plants itself in, the realm where one can cross over from the missing to the gone. Every song on the record is a story of someone parting the curtain of reality and slipping behind it; some of the disappeared are runaways, some have been taken, some have been swallowed up by darkness without evidence or explanation, but each missing person opens up a mystical emptiness in the place they’ve left behind and in the people who still live there. 

“Someone’s disappeared again / and now they’re dragging the reservoir,” Connor sings on the opener “Heat Lightning”; his Scott Walker-esque baritone thrums against the steady heartbeat of a bass drum and a guitar ruminating somewhere between country and old rock and roll but never fully giving into either. Connor plays in the shadows of both genres throughout the record—think Chris Isaak if he really disappeared into the Black Lodge just like his character in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. In fact, Connor’s work on Disappearances is more than a little Lynchian, particularly in the mode of Peaks and Mulholland Dr.; his songs thrill and despair at the impossibility of knowing someone completely, the missing pieces in our images of other people, especially since those images are subject to constant erosion. “He was gone before the memories finished forming / I’ve forgotten if his eyes were grey or green” goes a lyric in “Sawdust Trail,” the narrator attempting to pin down the last remaining details of a phantomic lover that rises from a lake. 

The real keeps bending into the surreal in this way over the course of Disappearances, people wandering so far from home and so deeply into themselves that they no longer recognize the world around them. Bridges and codas open like trapdoors in the songs. The percussion can sound like some stumbling through a field crunching dead leaves underfoot, or like a riding crop sounding in the distance. It can also crackle like an old record, or rather like a sample of an old record you might hear creaking its way through a Portishead song; on “Lose This Number,” the first single from the record, such a drum figure stutters through the track and pulses against thick spiderwebs of guitar, as Connor’s voice sings of the loneliness and the feelings of disappearance that accompany a friend’s betrayal: “When they come for me / and they’re going to come / don’t you come running to my aid.”

Connor’s keen observations of the ghostly trails people leave behind is what binds the songs on Disappearances together, even when the arrangements are crisp and spangled as a Nudie suit, as they are on “Desaparecido,” a legitimate country ballad that builds and builds until it’s suddenly a political song for Linda Ronstadt to sing, complete with choir. But the album is also capable of the stillness of a garden at night, beauty shrouded and complicated by the dark. “Driftwood” is one of the most gorgeous moments on the album for this very reason, the pale light of Connor’s falsetto sinking into a coursing riverbed of strings and guitar, his narrator wanting to be fully aware of the moment before their disappearance—or possibly even their death—“I want to see it coming / I want to look it in the eye / I want to know what hit me / I want to blow a kiss goodbye.” After Connor stops singing, the strings and guitars coil into a vortex that the song disappears down. And just like that, it’s gone.

—Ivy Nelson

Matthew Connor is a crooner for the 21st century, writing heart-wrenching songs that combine the windswept ideals of classic American balladry with stark depictions of modern-day alienation. The Boston-based Connor has a haunting voice that conjures ghosts of past heartbreaks, and he pairs it with spectral guitars that recall country tearjerkers and alt-pop brooding.

—Maura Johnston

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