Track Listing

1. Guilty
2. Watch Your Step
3. Irrelevant
4. Dead Girl
5. Chrome
6. Lights of the Commodore Barry
7. Disappointed
8. Beautiful Fool
9. Railroaded
10. Dam
11. Comfort
12. Certainly Never

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #195249 in Music
• Number of discs: 1

Customer Reviews

Comfort for Beautiful Fools
Its 1am and you shuffle of the bar stool and onto the floor your heads pounding from regret and whiskey and you wish you were back home you feel your brothers hands take hold of you as he carrys you out of the door then the cold winter night air stings and freezes your face as you realise this life will humble you - astound and amaze as the salt crunches under your wasted boots while your brother takes your weight.

Mathew Ryan transports the listener to another setting, to another place, from a late night desert drive to a lonely movie scene. He takes us out of our world but into another, so familiar - but yet not lived. Mathew Ryans songs occupy the same emotional terrain among other great artists such as:
Springsteen - Nebraska
Waits Time, Downtown Train
Dylan Blood on the Tracks
Cohen Everybody Knows
and many more.
I cant recomend Ryans work enough he has a number of CDs available but May Day was his first offering from 1997 and is a great place to start, as its more than just an introduction into such an overlooked collection.

May Day begins with a bolstered track that reveals a gravel worn voice singing 'Here comes the razor of doubt/Here comes the falling out. Here comes the wave and the turn/Here comes the crash and the burn'.
From the first hearing of the opening track, 'Guilty' will have you hooked with its anthem like quality so much that you will be singing along to its closing chant of 'I need someone to save me/I need someone to say to me that everything is gona be alright'.
'Watch Your Step' does not disapiont as the next track, it builds incredably from the first track with a fantastic opening again full of brutaly honest lyrics 'so you left with the impression if I could just clear my head/Youd be back with me one day'.
You must buy this album as every song alongside his other albums are without a doubt, MUST HAVES.
Mathew never lets up - he consatntly provides comfort in a mixed up world taking us away from the pain to remind us of the beauty we can still find amongst all this heartache and regret that life plays out for us.
I only wanted to give a taster of what I feel is an incredable talent that should not be discarded.
The May Day cover is a photograph of Mathew Ryan looking not unlike a 'morning after the night before' Kiefer Sutherland watering a dying lawn - that sums up this album - its comfort for beautiful fools.
So as Mathew says on his final song of the album 'Certainly Never':
'If I held you up would that be enough?'If I gave you all that I was capable of
'would that be enough?
'would that be enough?'
This CD is more than enough, even the linear notes are poetry.
So its 'not everything ending as it begins...'
but yes 'I've been guilty of all these things'.
Get this album and then at least you will know what Im rambling about!!! and then you to can become a beautiful fool

A perfectly structured album supported by well written songs, a finely played band and a voice that speaks from wisdom.