Review: Matthew Danger Lippman’s ‘Touchdown USA’ EP is a superb static shock

Matthew Danger Lippman‘s voice teeters back and forth in seesaw fashion, sometimes gliding, other times pulverizing punches like when your friend hops off mid-way through and you slam into the earth with a “bam!,” teeth chattering. Across his five-song EP, Touchdown USA, lo-fi electric guitar static bleeds and rips through the stratosphere, particularly with the reverberating scratches found embedded within “U Did Me In.” Lippman accentuates his words and phrasing with a dirty glam-pop slither, as if creeping in and out of the shadows before pouncing right onto your face

Out of Brooklyn, Lippman drops to his knees to unleash a deafening wallop with “Suburban Girlfriend,” a swampy, starkly-lit appeal for life’s simplicity to arrest him anew. “Suburban countryside / I need to be in the open-wide,” he slurs, winding up his vocals like a tilt-o-whirl. “I need to feel that release / It’s just not the same.” Haunted and bruised, and a little bit sensual, his charms elicit an unstoppable magnetic field, calling to the days of yore when David Bowie and Freddie Mercury could snarl and slap their jaws with a provocative tiger-like energy.

Lippman shares in that ferocious sensibility, and when he totally throws you for a loop, pulling in the reins on the title track, you really don’t know what to think. “You’re quite the difficult nut to crack / And I’m an intimacy-phobic acrobat / And your boyfriend, he’s on tour in the UK,” he sings, a sticky, psychedelic backdrop twinkling and gurgling around him. He’s nothing if not adventurous.

Touchdown U.S.A.‘s only downfall is it’s too short. Can you imagine what he could do with a The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars concept? Well, he certainly has plenty of time to get there.

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