Album Review!

Bare Bones 'is a fascinating and unique musical offering'

Published Saturday November 21st, 2009

Wilfred Langmaid

"Frederictonian Matt McFarlane had the fire of music light within him in the 1990s. The spark was rock, grunge, and alternative music of that decade.

This spark is the antecedent of a very raw, aggressive way of acoustic guitar playing, singing, and song construction.

That fascinating combination - heavy '90s rock at the core of solo acoustic singer/songwriter craft - makes McFarlane's entirely self-written, self-recorded, self-mixed, and self-produced album Bare Bones a fascinating and unique musical offering.

The fusion works for a few reasons. Most importantly, McFarlane is at the core a decent songwriter. The 11 tracks that make up the so-aptly-named Bare Bones are diverse; their power has the dual weaponry of good lyric writing and a furious delivery on vocals and guitar.

The whole thing is a stirring one-person offering of the roots of man's musical soul, delivered by a hitherto-unknown local musician who has the skills to make a unique offering work well."

Fredericton-based freelance writer Wilfred Langmaid has reviewed albums in The Daily Gleaner since 1981, and is a past judge for both the Junos and the East Coast Music Awards. His column appears each Saturday.

Source: http://dailygleaner.canadaeast.com/liveit/article/864755

Song Description #5 - Glorify

It's really a shame how money runs the world. ...And propaganda. Just because you read it or see it on TV, it doesn't make it right. And just because the government does it and tells you it's okay, it still doesn't make it right. Of course I'm sure you already knew that. I'm not the most politically aware person in the world, but I know the difference between right and wrong, and manipulation is wrong. If we all took the dollar signs out of our eyes, we'd see a lot more truths right in front of us. The sad thing is, we have to see the dollar signs in order to survive. So what to do? Find a middle ground I suppose.

If you haven't seen Michael Moore's newest film, "Capatalism: A Love Story," watch it. I wrote this song years before that movie came out, but the movie is exactly what this song is about. It's about greedy capitalistic bastards glorifying themselves with no real care for the lower class.

I write a lot of songs in "Drop D." For the non-guitarists, it's where you tune the lowest string of the guitar from the standard "E" down to a "D." It gives the guitar a little more range and a little more "kick." I play about half of the songs on "Bare Bones" in "Drop D," but this song was the first one where I fell in love with the tuning.

Youtube

So I now have a link on my site to my Youtube page where you can find some videos. There you will find a few videos from my CD Release Party. Unfortunately there were some lovely ladies directly beside the digital camera that was recording me most of the time, so needless to say the sound quality of the music is lacking. I put up a few clips anyway. If nothing else, they still look kind of cool and I learned how to use the new "iMovie!"