The Singles Bar: MAWD medicates in a ‘Dark Room’
The alt-rock newcomer wallows in her mind’s dark clouds.
Welcome to The Singles Bar, a review series focused on new single and song releases.
The mind can be a tricky place. The sheer complexity can be unnerving, strangling normal functions and binding darkness around your limbs like a bear trap. “Feeling empty / Feeling hollow,” Madelin Matthews, who goes by MAWD onstage, yowls in pain and pares her mental facilities into compartmentalized chunks. The isolation is insurmountable, and her voice dissolves into the only palpable solution. “Darling, I’m far from home / Half these faces I don’t even known,” she spurs, drums and guitar fracturing and reassembling around her. Matthews builds the story shrewdly and allows her voice’s bluesy tear to wrangle the arrangement behind her, dragging her swelling heart out into the open.
“I felt like I was going crazy, sitting in my dark dingy dorm room, struggling with the longing for a comforting feeling, trying to fit in, feeling like a stranger in my skin and discovering a new dark part of my mind,” she says about the song, produced by Roger Gisborne (The Gun Shys) and Josiah Mezzaschi (Kate Nash). Its fuming ether slices to the bone, upending nerve endings and membrane, a physical manifestation of the mind’s brazen wrestling match ⎯⎯ and in many ways, she’s the victim of herself, throbbing to be released.
Matthews’ potency stems from her willingness to explore the rougher, more brittle edges of her voice and allow the listener to feel as trapped and fearful as she does. “Now that I’m far from you, well, I don’t have one good soul to turn to,” she cowers, her body decaying into an abyss of misery from which she can’t seem to escape. “Living in a city where money runs the game,” she later sings, and it becomes clear some of the implications of her deteriorated self-worth is rooted in outside forces.
“Dark Room” is a sublime piece of gloom and sticks on your brain long after you think you’ve forgotten about it.
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