::MATCHBOOK ROMANCE::

Matchbook Romance, the now defunct 4-piece rock band from Poughkeepsie, New York, was a band that caught my attention from the start. I don't even remember exactly when I heard the group, but from the start, my thoughts have always been somewhere along the lines of "Hey, these guys are alright". After hearing a few songs from their debut album, Stories and Alibis, I went over to the record store and picked up a copy. I was pretty satisfied for a while, but after a while, the CD went from the car stereo, the CD case, then after a while, back into the case and on the shelf. Don't get me wrong, it was a good album, and I still enjoy listening to songs such as "Promise", "Tiger Lily", "Stay Tonight", and "The Greatest Fall of All Time"...but the CD just got old.

After some time (and losing track on what Matchbook Romance was actually doing), I caught wind that they had produced a new album, Voices. I was interested, just to see how it'd be. To my surprise, what I thought the record would be and what it actually was were polar opposites. The new album was, in a single, solitary word, rockin'. I began with track one ("You Can Run, But We'll Find You"), starting off with the piano plunking out a melody. Throughout the course of the song, the instrumentation builds on itself until finally (at about 2:20), the song launches into what we all wanted it to do: rock. The album continues in the same fashion as the first track, fully rocking while still maintaining the brooding, haunting quality that makes it great. Then comes one of the track highlights (the first single), "Monsters", which is about as dance-y a track as ever, complete with handclaps and a mind-numbing guitar solo to bring the song to its peak. In the back end of the album, the song "What A Sight" is found, a ballad-like love song ("Don't ever forget me/I thought I lost you") that still maintains that ghostly sound found all throughout the album. Though Matchbook Romance has since gone on an indefinite hiatus, the albums (especially the latter) released will always have a spot in my music collection.