Review: Matthew Pinder emerges as a true luminary on new album, ‘Give Me Some Time’

Art soaks in new meaning through the lens of tragedy. The rubbles might be caked in smoke, but there’s beauty in the way the clouds curl and fold and wiggle together up into the hot blue sky. It can be hard to discern between ruin and enrapturing splendor, two strands of existence that feed and nurture as one. Folk designer by trade, New Providence’s Matthew Pinder hollows out his own heart with his extraordinarily-gutting 10-song debut ⏤ an emotionally-savage storybook in which he exhumes such matters as relationship exhaustion, mental decay, death and clawing loose from strangling blackness. Give Me Some Time ⏤ produced by Chris Jacobie (Penny & Sparrow) ⏤ is as gorgeous as it is devastating. Pinder’s penmanship is monumental, shifting through charcoals, ash and barely glowing embers. His pain comes in waves; his reedy tenor thrashes against the eardrums and busts the lining, drowning your soul with a godly body of work and message on the human condition and what recovery really is like.

“I’m gonna get better / It’ll take a lot / I had reached a flood of emptiness from all the things you taught,” he drags his fingernails across the present. With the title track, his voice splinters the notes, and his self-imposed absolution tangles with the necessity of time. Its brisk 90-second run underscores the severity of his emotions, always hanging on his eyelids and squeezing him weary and worn, rather relentlessly. During the recording of the album, Pinder’s dear mother passed away rather suddenly, so many themes and storyboards become ignited with glowing-red agony and anger. Jagged and broken, “Compromise” stabs the jugular and lets him bleed out completely onto the record. “I need you to stay,” he begs, permitting the arrangement to slice at his throat. Even “Rest,” bookending the set, appears to buckle and break beneath it all. “Keep setting your fires, I know you’ve had enough / And you don’t remember a time that you felt sane,” he sings over a single piano, swarming strings swinging in silky motions.

Death is one of a few threads stitching each of us to one another. “And my body wears thin clinging to you / I was clinging to all the things I thought I knew,” he cowers in the sunlight, sharp and bright. “Golden Hour” washes upon the sands of still existentialism, provoked by cold, brutal endings and an ache to soothe it. Her memory haunts his every moment, from dawn to dusk, and the only way to cope is to soak in it all as a diver scavenging the foamy sea bottom. With “St. Paul, MN,” he upturns his angst and listlessness into a pop-ladled, jam-band number. “Didn’t see ya coming with my own wide eyes / Feeling so cold won’t you let me back inside,” he crows and bobs to the beat. But even his painstaking attention to cover the sores in his chest can’t stop the obvious bleeding, seeping through makeshift bandages in pungent drops.

Each song is as a bomb exploding in mid-air ⏤ from the Molly Bush-featuring songbird duet “Break My Heart and Let Me Go” to “Flooded,” flaked plaster and all. Coming in two pieces, “Before the Fall” and “After the Fall” detail his now disjointed, perhaps aloof, life, fated to be forever defined by catastrophic pillars and scars. “It’s harder than I thought it would be/ But I’m stronger than I thought I could be,” barely slips from his lips on the latter, his most remarkable performance of his career. Both entries, though, highlight raw bravery in never avoiding or side-stepping the wreckage that has become a vital part of his life. He moves forward with tears stained on his cheeks, his chest, his heart. The emotional ruffles are altogether penetrating.

Give Me Some Time is Pinder’s magnum opus: a debut so rich and extravagantly heart-rending and deeply-crushing. He’s certainly got his work cut out for him moving forward. But here, right now in this moment, Pinder leaves an indelible mark on indie-folk music in a way few ever achieve. Glorious.

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