MATMOS – The Rose Has Teeth In The Mouth Of A Beast – CD+Cards – OLE677-2

Electronic music is generally a sound-for-sound’s-sake proposition, offering either functional grooves for dancing’n’drugging or abstract bleepscapes for chilling’n’drifting. San Francisco duo Matmos are pioneers of a micro-trend that goes in the opposite direction. You could call it ‘conceptronica’: experimental techno that comes laden with content, often political. This kind of thing can get a bit ponderous, but happily, The Rose Has Teeth first and foremost captivates the ear sonically, with the album’s grand theme – each track is a ‘sound biography’ of a dead gay icon – simply adding an enjoyable bonus layer of intrigue. Most of the inspirational figures are avant-gardists or radicals of one sort or another. Ground-breaking gay sex chronicler Boyd McDonald, for instance, is commemorated with a woozy, mellow track that resembles a jazz-rock album warped after being left in a car boot on a hot summer day, while ‘Semen Song for James Bidgood’ is as voluptuous and fantastical as the photographer/ film-maker’s cult erotic movie Pink Narcissus.

Simon Reynolds / The Guardian