CD Odyssey Disc 1234: Matt Patershuk

It was a cold and dark walk home tonight and I am both tired and a bit battered by the north wind. Fortunately, I had music for the walk – here’s what it was.

Disc 1234 is… Same as I Ever Have Been

Artist: Matt Patershuk

Year of Release: 2017

What’s up with the Cover? I’m embarrassed to say I don’t know what this is. Some kind of juke box, maybe – like those small ones they used to mount on diner tables? In any event, it is promising a mid-evening selection of songs for both “regretful brutes” and “sentimental drunkards” which sounds like two ways an evening can go sideways.

How I Came To Know It: I read about Matt Patershuk in a Canadian folk magazine around the time this album came out. That drew me to look him up online and I liked what I heard, so I bought both this album and 2015’s “I Was So Fond of You.”

How It Stacks Up:  I have just those two Matt Patershuk albums. Of the two, I must put “Same As I Have Ever Been” in second place.

Ratings:  4 stars

Matt Patershuk is a throwback in all the most delightful ways. His homespun, earthy songs are like a cross between the outlaw country of sixties Merle Haggard and the confessional folk of eighties Leonard Cohen.

If that comparison made you imagine a gravelly, whisky-damaged voice then you were right. Patershuk has a rasp to his mosey that draws you in like some guy in a smoky pub telling stories up at the bar to anyone who’ll listen.

The opening track – the excessively titled “Sometimes You’ve Got to do Bad Things to Do Good” is the exception to all of this. It is a blues driven electric blast of hard choices and the grown-assed men who make them. It’s a great song, but after this Patershuk settles down into his more introspective side.

The album has a lot of country twang to it. Albeit less than his previous release “I Was So Fond of You,” but still plenty of bar-door swingin’ and songs about working class lads putting in an honest day of labour.

While I’m not one for delving too much into the artist’s biography, blue-collar anthems like “Hot Knuckle Blues” are a bit more fun when you know that Patershuk is himself a handy guy and a general contractor who lives on a farm and makes his real money building bridges and working with his hands. This means you’re less likely to see him out on tour (at the time of this writing his next advertised show is at the Grande Prairie Legion Hall) but it does mean you can expect authenticity in his art.

Patershuk deserves to be a whole lot more famous. His music may be simple, but it is cleverly written and his lyrics are downright erudite. On the once-again excessively titled “Memory and the First Law of Thermodynamics” he sings about the loss of his sister, who died a few years ago at the hands of a drunk driver.

“Memory…” is a heartfelt song about all the things that remind Patershuk of his sister, and the comfort he takes in that aforementioned Law of Thermodynamics. Or as Patershuk paints it:

“You know physicists say folks don’t go away

That all things continue to be

That all of you floats above in the blue

You’re just less orderly.”

Patershuk’s vocals remind me of Cohen on this and many other songs. He has Cohen’s phrasing, and while he’s not as masterful with the pen, he can still manage more than a few quatrains with a brilliant twist at the end.

The Cohen comparisons are further aided by the way the arrangements use flourishes of saxophone and piano and the loose harmonies of fellow folk singer Ana Egge who comes in at the top of many of the song to add a ghost of poignance to the experience.

On “Atlas” Patershuk artfully mixes imagery of the ancient titan Atlas holding up the world, with a regular man in a pub filled with regret. Like any great songwriter, Patershuk sets the scene in the specific:

“Atlas, holding the world up?

Aah, c’mon man, you know that’s just a myth

He’s drinkin’ in a Grande Prairie bar called breakers

With a herniated disc.”

And then turns myth into a cautionary tale for us all:

“Guess that is the lonely life

Of solitary gods and men

Pullin’ on a sleeve of cheap flat draught

Wishin’ we could it all again.”

Other than some of the song titles being too damned long, my biggest complaint with this record is it is a little long. It is only 12 songs, but many are over five minutes and feel like they could resolve sooner. Sometimes this becomes just part of Patershuk’s slow-shuffle charm, but other times they dragged.

This is a pretty minor complaint however, on a record that deserves a lot more attention, and an artist that is making some pretty great art in about as unassuming way as you’ll find. He’s well worth a trip to Legion, if you’re lucky enough to be passing through Grande Prairie on the right night.

Best tracks: Sometimes You’ve Got to Do Bad Things to Do Good, Gypsy, Memory and the First Law of Thermodynamics, Boreal, Atlas