MATTHEW DEAR - Asa Breed Review

For those who may have considered dance music too coarse—too repetitious and formulaic—Matthew Dear was the easy way in. When I couldn’t say if the genre’s tendency to blister-to-freeze and its subtle augmentations were best for homestudy or latenight blitzkrieg—and, shit, was pretty much stuck in the “once you’ve heard one. . .” camp—Dear’s 2003 debut under his own moniker, Leave Luck To Heaven and its shorter companion piece of 2004, Backstroke, offered up his palatable micro in pill form: quick, potent, and assured in their sense of melody and time-shift....full text American micro-house golden boy Matthew Dear has been inching toward an all-out pop assault since 2003's breakthrough Leave Luck to Heaven. His reliance on the 4/4 beat has steadily diminished, and his incorporation of a prominent vocal presence and pop-oriented songwriting has increased, noticeably on 2004's Backstroke and now on Asa Breed, where it's front and center. For an artist as diverse as Dear (he also records as Audion, his foray into the international techno scene), this evolution comes as no surprise....full text Between the animalistic funk of 2003 single "Dog Days"-- a dance track that cheerfully nuzzled its way into a SXSW/CMJ mindset-- and 2004's Backstroke LP, there was a lot of talk of Matthew Dear's shapeshifting abilities. He'd already proven, both under his own name (recording for Ghostly and its Spectral sublabel) and as False (for Richie Hawtin's Plus 8 and Minus labels) and Jabberjaw (for Perlon), that he could stretch and twist his Slinky-like tracks to traverse any hairpin of techno's staircase....full text