Debut solo outing for Jared Mattson (of the Mattson 2) on Toro y Moi's Company Records (he jumped in on production) .

Includes a song entirely in Japanese and a cover of Ween's ‘She Wanted To Leave’. Influenced by Jared's adoration of reggae stalwarts (such as Aswad/Burning Spear and also Andy Summers/The Police) with added jazz and pop tinges.

Like many debut solo albums from musicians in bands, Jared Mattson’s Peanut didn’t originally come from a need to break away. As a composer for the Mattson 2, Jared Mattson was working up a batch of new songs through the winter of 2019-2020, looking ahead to the next album he and brother Jonathan Mattson, the blitzkrieging drummer, would record. As the pandemic hit stateside, Jared holed up in his home studio and kept developing the new music. And during that process it became increasingly clear to them that this wasn’t shaping up to be the next Mattson 2 album. This was a Mattson 1 album.

Jared had been absorbing the guitar work on records by reggae stalwarts Aswad and Burning Spear, and also the Police’s Andy Summer and the ways he gives songs space. And Jared wanted a prominent bass sound, too, where the guitar itself sometimes settles into the passenger seat so that the bass can drive. Lyrically, the album taps into our rattled world, where anxiety, loss, violence, and regret are sometimes pierced by the promise of love. The time spent working on the album was a profoundly introspective time as he reflected on past relationships while living through and writing during the pandemic, he also never lost sight of this truth about himself: Life is great with music.

One of the album’s standout highlights is “Burn Down Babylon,” which is propelled by the bass’s funk-you-say groove. You don’t often encounter many pop songs with so blunt an opening line as, “I got punched in the face last night by a neo-Nazi,”—a true experience that was delivered many years ago in a bar brawl in Carlsbad, California. But to hear the music that goes along with this tale manages a vibe that is less melee and more backyard jubilee.

When “Please Come Here,” with an intro that slinks along like a Cadillac on a Sunday morning drive, kicks in, it’s typical of the album’s melodic pop flourishes, but the twist here is that the vocals are in Japanese (The Mattson 2 have toured Japan 20 times and covered many Japanese pop songs on 2018’s Vaults of Eternity: Japan). Ween’s “She Wanted to Leave” is the lone cover, but the way Jared reimagines the song makes it fits seamlessly within the album’s sonic template. The song’s inclusion was also a personal way to honour one of Jared’s best friends, who died from cancer two years ago. The two had always bonded over the song and marvelled at its inherent beauty. Ultimately, Mattson’s solo debut unfolds like a string of fascinating clouds: These are not songs in a hurry; they shift around as they float by, and, most notably, they carry their unique kind of electric charge.

TRACK LISTING

1. Peanut
2. Please Come Home
3. Burn Down Babylon
4. She Wanted To Leave
5. Don't Run
6. Life Could Be So Much Better
7. Dry
8. Nish Nish Tahee Loosh
9. Exit

When things are right, they’re right; it’s rare that everything falls into place. It’s rarer still to capture that feeling on wax, which is what The Mattson 2 have achieved with their latest album, Paradise. It’s their second release on Chaz Bear’s (fka Chaz Bundick, aka Toro y Moi) Company Records, and first without Bear as a member of the band.

The identical twins, Jared (guitars) and Jonathan (drums), have left their trademark virtuosity on display; within the 32-minute runtime they’ve managed to capture the arc of an entire relationship between two people. You can tell from how warm the guitars sound - we go from emotional equilibrium to longing to happiness to loss. “For years and years you’ve been on my mind,” they sing, and mean it. When the Mattsons sing the line “you’re so special, you’re so easy” it’s easy to forget they’re not talking to you.

Even so, it’s a record to throw a frisbee to — it’s a sylphlike, sylvan thing, meant to be used and enjoyed. “We don’t want people to think too hard,” they say. “We want to let people in!” That’s perhaps because it’s the first album they’ve written and recorded in their home, which is a wooden cabin in the hills of San Diego. You can hear the sun in the keyboards, in the 80s-inflected jazz. The singing is new, too. What it adds up to is a bigger, bolder sound than their previous work; the brothers say they went into it trying out a conceptually new, cohesive sound — a new sonic palette to create from. It’s a little bit of summer you can savor all year long.

They’ve been playing shows for 15 years without any vocals; on Paradise, though, the twins have added their voices to the mix, which adds a welcome new human dimension to the record. “No matter how much someone loved the instrumental set they’d ask if we sang!” Jared said. Even so, the lyrics are meant to be abstract, to conjure a mood. If you listen closely you’ll be able to discern what the Mattson brothers are feeling. There’s longing, in songs that are about getting what you want and realizing it’s not actually the right thing; there’s lyrics about not being free, in both the capitalist system and in the creative one. There’s a song about a loved one dying from an overdose. There are deep themes here, even if the subjects are treated lightly.

On “Naima’s Dream,” which opens the album, the Mattsons lock into a buoyant melody; it sounds like the feeling of lying in a park on a carefree, sunny day, watching the dogs chase the people throwing frisbees in the distance. That feeling carries through the rest of the album, too; on “Essence,” which describes a relationship in progress. “You’re so special, you’re so easy,” the Mattsons sing over a lush guitar arrangement propelled by a truly grooving bass line.

The range of human experience is vast, and the Mattsons have managed to capture a piece of it in stunning detail. Being alive demands every kind of adjective: difficult, boring, fun, sustaining, affirming, renewing, reviving, strenuous, punishing, arbitrary, unfeeling, inconvenient, and everything in between. The slice that the Mattsons describe in this album is uniformly sweet, but inflected with the knowledge of how quickly things can change, and how, most of the time, it’s hard to recognize that they’re changing until the metamorphosis is already complete.

Given the state of modern music and its fabricated pop icons, what Chaz Bundick Meets The Mattson 2 achieves is a collective music victory in a new era of progressive soundscapes. World-renowned composer/producer extraordinaire Chaz Bundick (Toro Y Moi, Les Sins) has teamed up with the psychedelic-jazz grooves of The Mattson 2 for an album that unifies a trio's creativity into a refreshing project of unhinged sonic originality.

Oddly enough, this collaboration may not have happened if The Mattson 2 hadn’t forgotten a drum throne at an Oakland performance in 2014. The twin’s longtime friend and photographer, Andrew Paynter, came to the rescue and called his friend Chaz to ask about borrowing the throne. Jonathan, the Mattson drummer (who’d also never met Chaz), accompanied Andrew to Chaz's home in Berkeley where they were greeted by Chaz with a warm smile, a drum stool in hand, and Michael, Chaz's dog (which his Les Sins record Michael is named after).

The next day Andrew and the twins met Chaz at a cafe in Berkeley to return the gear. Over coffee they waxed about music, design, furniture, and skateboarding. After a series of hangs with Chaz in the Bay Area, the crew decided to join forces and schedule studio time for their newfound trio. And the rest, as they say, is intergalactic, mega-creative history.

In February of 2016 the relationship was officially christened the night they finished tracking their new record. And to tie the knot with flare, they scheduled a secret show at the Battery and a historical public show at the Starline Social Club in Oakland, where the trio performed all new music from the project for the first time live.

The group and the album, Chaz Bundick Meets Mattson 2, explores psychedelic, jazz, and improvisatory influences ranging from Afrofuturistic Sun Ra, to electric Miles Davis, to groove-fueled Serge Gainsbourg and The Zombies. Grounding the album are break-beats, synthesizers, acoustic strums, and guitar fuzz reminiscent of David Axelrod and Arthur Verocai. With cosmic structures, timeless influences, rich harmonies, and melodic interplays, the trio brings an intergalactic edge to both their live shows and an album worthy of repeated visits

TRACK LISTING

Sonmoi
A Search
JBS
Star Stuff
Steve Pink
Disco Kid
Dont Blame Yourself
Cascade

The Mattson 2 stride into a new realm of sound that blends their signature jazz soundscapes with ethereal structures and haunting splashes of improvisational raga techniques. This time around, they go deeper and darker, balancing an ebb and flow to create something truly mesmerizing, thanks in no small part to producer Thomas Campbell and the legendary John X. Volaitis (Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Phoenix).

This much-anticipated follow-up to 2011’s Feeling Hands is a marvel of jazz-rock orchestration and arrangement. The droning vistas of Agar are as technically liberating as they are hauntingly avantgarde. The duo is more connected than ever as they move in and out of exotic landscapes that transcend the concept of modern musical performance.

Named for the gelatinous substance that binds and connects items in a petri dish (also “raga” backwards), the album shimmers and shakes with sagely nods to the past and the soaring modern wizardry of Jared’s untamed guitars and Jonathan’s tribally hard-bop drumming. With Campbell and Volaitis at the helm, Agar is awash with the sun and surf as much as it is mysterious metal jazz. It glistens with a beautiful weirdness, conjuring images of neon-light rain dances and fireworks in darkening summer skies.

The musical capabilities of Farmer Dave Sher (Interpol, Kurt Vile, Vetiver) add unique and pivotal symphonic layers. And for the first time, the Mattson 2 provide emotional complexity via voice: Maryann Tran’s Easternly, wordless sounds are euphoric and majestic. All of this adds to up a layer cake of hypnotic mood and otherworldly innovation.

TRACK LISTING

1. Peaks Of Yew
2. Dif Juz
3. Pure Ego Death
4. Meluminary
5. Agar