Beautiful Midnight opens with cheerleaders spelling success as K-I-C-K-A-S-S. At first, it is funny. Then the feedback swells, the guitars arrive, and the chant starts sounding like a command.
Matthew Good Band spends the next hour inside that contradiction. The band is making the biggest rock music of its career while Matthew Good writes about people who distrust success, normal life, and, quite often, themselves.
That raises the central question: how do you write anthems for people who don’t trust anthems?
The original Canadian sequence gives each song an hour, running from 5 p.m. on “Giant” to “Running for Home” at sunup. The clock gives the album direction without forcing a continuous story. Public spectacle keeps giving way to private collapse, sometimes within the same song.
“Hello Time Bomb” follows the oversized opening with a compact riff and Ian Browne’s forceful drumming. Good sounds caught between swagger and unraveling. “Load Me Up” runs on Rich Priske’s urgent bass and clipped guitars before its chorus turns a desire to escape your own head into something a crowd can shout.
“The Future Is X-Rated” pushes Good’s voice through electronic distortion while its images arrive like fragments from a late-night broadcast: holes in the sky, missing children, an absent God, and the devil on roller skates. The hooks carry all of it without resolving any of it.
The quieter songs change the scale without changing the subject. “Strange Days” pulls the arrangement back and moves between people close to breaking. “Suburbia” leaves space around a picture of domestic normality emptied out. On “Failing the Rorschach Test,” psychological distress becomes physical through images of caving in and peeling away skin. Lowering the volume leaves the same disconnection exposed.
After midnight, the album gets stranger. “Jenni’s Song” delivers its grotesque family story with unsettling bluntness. “A Boy and His Machine Gun” shifts between restraint and eruption rather than choosing one. “Born to Kill” gathers guitars, synths, and strings into a long, jagged climb that finally breaks apart.
“Running for Home” follows with piano and strings. Good reaches sunup, sounding drained rather than renewed. The night has ended, but nothing has been neatly repaired.
So how do you write anthems for people who don’t trust anthems? You make the choruses large enough to gather them, then refuse to use that size as reassurance. Beautiful Midnight gives everyone something to sing together without pretending the song has fixed what brought them there.
Written by Rob Joncas for DeadNoteMedia.
Artist information and music courtesy of the band.
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