Written by: Dave Cantrell

There’s poignant, there’s quite poignant, then there’s fucking poignant. Welcome to the latter. The work of Matthew Edwards, the effortlessly sublime nature of it, how the ‘songwriter’s songwriter’ tag, though certainly as applicable with Edwards as with anyone ever, nonetheless pales in its too-pat clichéness, stands – if a bit mutedly as per the San Francisco-based artist’s standard touch of British reserve – multiple heads and shoulders above most any contemporaries you’d care to name.

Now, those of us here at SEM – and our more longstanding faithful readers – have been here (and here and here) before but despite that we were still barely prepared for what landed in our lap last fall with the subtly – if suitably – titled Hark which, to ladle on the aforementioned poignancy, the artist has decided is his final go. It is, in fact, the very valedictory nature of the thing that brings us to the brink of our editorial capacities, which is to say there’s some wonderfully fateful synchronicity to us, as music writers, quite likely reaching our limit of such as regards the Edwards catalog just as the artists assures us it is, in fact, his last. And so the challenge then is to find newer, fresher, more up to date – or, perhaps, simply more accurate – words and turns of phrase with which to parse the excellence before us. And whereas we fully acknowledge the already extant prediliction we have at SEM for raining hosannas down on this or that album or artist (an inevitable by-product of our unspoken policy of exclusively covering work that moves us in ways most work doesn’t), the fact is that even as this guy’s work has never not presented as the product of some effortless flow as if it emerged from impetus to finished product with an ease akin to dipping a bucket in to a well and simply hauling it up even as we understand the process is far more painstakingly demanding than that – a testament right there to the natal talent underlying – it’s just that, this last time, Mr. Edwards may well have outdone himself and, as exits go, that really can’t be beaten, can it?

“Evergreen,” our first track here, creeps in above a couple of gently plucked acoustics and a soft rise of strings as if to suggest the word ‘spindly’ actually means ‘lush’ and from there there’s no turning back, not least when the voice comes in brushed full of romantic longing with this artist’s usual touch of existential resignation and, yes, there is indeed something fog-like in the track’s mood – one easily imagines Edwards’ gaze somehow perched atop Mt. Sutro in the late afternoon as the shroud claims the peninsula – the track bestows that sense of envelopment but as this is who it is we’re talking about, well, that’s no surprise really, is it?

And the spell continues, unabated and shot through with grace throughout. Whether it be “A New Moon,” gently soaked in mellotron and cello (Isaac Bonnell and Adaiha McAdams Somer, respectively, both veteran – and essential – contributors over the years to the distinct palette of the ‘Edwards sound’) as the singer negotiates that ever-fragile, fatalistic line between dreams and the mundanity that forever surrounds; the delicate restlessness of “Haunted Head,” Edwards pleading “please be still, my haunted head” and like anyone hearing it or reading this we can count on zero hands how many people we can think of who don’t relate; the sonorous, uptempo pop joy of legacy-defining centerpiece “The Old Sun,” its chiming propulsive charm ensuring it lingers in our hearts’ memory for all our ages to come (while also, it should be said, confirming the wisdom of the singer deciding to self-produce this elegiac swansong); the tensile regret that, with no small thanks to Bonnell’s quick guitar outbreak, drives “Oliver” straight toward the core of a kind of pop majesty where all such gems are found, to deeply wistful closer “Los Angeles,” built with strings and longing along the arc of a persistent piano figure that by its very (almost innocent) nature manages to present the spectre of the delicate tiptoeing toward the eternal, the two hand-in-hand as has been the long-established Edwards way and insofar a it being the final of the final of this artist’s body of work – not an easy thing to write, I must admit – it carries its weight with an irrepressible strength and grace, as, by all measures right and worthy, it should most certainly do.

So, as should be obvious by this point, the shimmer here is not chimerical but grounded in the none-more-universal stirrings and yearning of the human heart. Yes, the sound of Hark does have about it a kind of shine – think streetlights glimmering in a late Monday night mist over near the Presidio, maybe – but it’s one carried by what one might consider a ‘doleful wonder’ and indeed that’s been an Edwards trademark since forever but here it can nearly overwhelm in the subtlety of its grandeur. In short, what a glorious triumph to go out on.

Matthew Edwards: acoustic guitar and vocals
Isaac Bonnell: acoustic and electric guitars, piano, mellotron, percussion
Camilla Saufley: bass, flute and vocalsCraigus Barry: electric guitars
Jefferson Marshall: drums
Adaiha McAdam-Somer: cello
Angeline Morrison: vocals on ‘The Old Son and ‘Olivia’
Erin Moran: vocals on ‘Los Angeles’
Charith Premawardhana: viola
Dianne Grubbe: flute on ‘Levitate’
Bass on ‘The Old Son’, ‘Olivia’ and ‘Levitate’ by Tom Edler.