Indie-folk offers originality with a number of highlights.
Matt Cascella may not be a name that rings lots of bells, but this is not his first visit to these digital pages. In 2018 we featured his album ‘Stud Farm’, released under the moniker Owlbiter. Fast forward 6 years and Cascella’s latest solo album is released as indie-folk project Schmoon. The Owlbiter project, in Cascella’s own words, “had a hurried sound, recorded like I was going to die in a couple days. There’s less agitation and urgency. I’m more observational. Instead of lamenting the sad parts of life, my favourite stuff is looking at the domestic details of life and finding interesting ways to talk about them. That’s the difference between Owlbiter and Schmoon.”
To use a tired old football analogy ‘Pretty Darn Pretty’ could be described as a game of two halves. The first few tracks meander along decently enough without making a huge impact and, by the time we reach the nadir of ‘Birthday Pancakes’, a two-minute song featuring glockenspiel, banjo and accordion, we are about to leave early for a pie and a pint.
And that would be a mistake as, from that point on, the album kicks into gear, and elevates itself to a whole new level. The transformation begins with ‘Danny Friend’, featuring producer, engineer, and mixer Brendon Thomas on finger picking banjo and distorted bass the song has a killer groove that builds to a frantic conclusion. Cascella follows this with the memorable Brazilian groove and horns of Jeremy Fink on ‘Table for One’ which has a 1950s’ crooner-pop vibe. It’s the song of a man going out to eat alone on his birthday who isn’t comfortable in his own skin.
The ethereal piano ballad that follows, ‘To a Butthead’, is a step back tempo-wise but no less memorable for that. It is a message from Cascella to himself about his own fear of death and he delivers the track with the emotion the subject matter demands and features the memorable “Live every day like it’s your last / Golly gosh that sounds exhausting.”
The album closes with the title track ‘Pretty Darn Pretty,’ a song that, on the surface, revels in the nostalgia of our remembered past, of fondly remembering our life’s highlights, before offering up the warning that wallowing in your own history without looking forward is a recipe for sadness. The refrain of “go back to the good ole days” repeats like a hypnotic suggestion, luring you into embracing a past that may have never existed at all.
These final tracks are reason enough to give the album a chance and serve to demonstrate the heights to which Cascella can reach in his latest guise as Schmoon.
