Call me a teenage girl (or Ewelina....close enough....oh!), but I greatly enjoyed the Tim Burton-inspired pop-punk of The Matches. Sadly, they are about to go on one of those hiatuses that I believe will really just stand the test of time as a breakup. Seeing as they have never been a band as lucrative as...say...Blink-182, I do not see a multi-million dollar, heavily sponsored reunion tour taking place in the near future. Or any future for that matter.
The Matches were a little too smart, a little too talented, and a little too late to reach a level of measurable mainstream success. Their whole Beetlejuice-informed neo-gothic image unfortunately came after Good Charlotte monopolized the pop-punk market with their pseudo-goth punk branding in the early 2000s. Ultimately, Good Charlotte tainted such an image with ill-fitting bondage pants paired with black and white thick vertical striped blazers, relationships with Paris Hilton, temper tantrums on Punk'd (one of the finest pieces of investigative television of our generation, it makes 60 Minutes look like geezer tripe), and a sudden re-invention as a nu-new wave band riding the coattails, slim fitting dress pants, and skinny ties of Interpol, The Killers, and Franz Ferdinand.
What I find to be most unfortunate about The Matches "hiatus" is that what will now be their last album, 2008's A Band in Hope, was such a disappointment. Sophomore album Decomposer (2006) set the band apart from their Warped Tour peers and presented a new take on pop-punk—that is, dare I say, a type of avant-garde pop-punk. The tracks on Decomposer still posses the necessary elements to attract teen girls: songs about love, sing-along choruses, quotable lines that could be used on social networking websites to sound profound. However, the tracks also possess elements of left-of-centre musical experimentation: electronic flourishes, intricate guitar riffs, key changes, and the usage of more than 3 or 4 chords per song.
The follow-up, A Band in Hope, ultimately does not follow the model built by Decomposer. Most of the tracks on the album are more straightforward, accessible pop that do nothing to catch my interest. Unfortunately, The Matches fell victim to their own creativity—Decomposer did not sell particularly well. This caused the band to scrap most of their original follow-up album, The Mad Silentist, and opt to write a more accessible album. Apparently, only a few tracks from the original made it onto A Band in Hope, which I suspect are the few tracks on the album I actually enjoy ("From 24C," "Clouds Crash," "To Build a Mountain").
Now that the band is on "hiatus," solo projects have emerged from lead vocalist Shaun Harris and lead guitarist/backup vocalist Jon Devoto respectively. Thus far, each of these projects sound like they are shaping up to be similar sounding to The Matches. So why go on "hiatus" at all?
