Centro-Matic "Calling Thermatico"

The last I’d personally heard from Centro-Matic was the song “Fuselage (It’s Starting to Look Like Christmas Once Again)” from 2002’s holiday comp Electric Ornaments: An Idol Records Christmas Collection. I was still a neophyte at this internet downloading thing, and would grab any free mp3 I could get my hands on. I believe this was courtesy of Epitonic, and I played the life out it, completely enamored with the opening line: “You, say what you gotta say to me/But try to say it nicefully/We only got a century”. Will Johnson’s voice, sounding like a dusty Wayne Coyne, painted that somewhat disconnected sentiment, surrounded as it was by flat snare and crunchy guitar, with an unsophisticated charm bordering on naivete. Then, around the 2:11 mark, everything shut down, leaving Johnson’s beautiful, damaged attempt at falsetto (double-tracked, I think) alone to echo as the song’s high point—the kind of thing that makes you start it over and reapproach the whole thing in a different light. I never followed up on this song by looking for others from the band; Centro-Matic became one of the many casualties of my nascent look-for-as-many-new-artists-as-possible mentality, which thankfully has waned quite a bit in the successive years.

I thus came to Centro-Matic’s new album Fort Recovery with mixed expectations—was their sound at all similar to a 4-year old song, a song I still love, written for a Christmas compilation? Was this even a fair comparison to make? To the second question, no. To the first though, a resounding yes. Johnson has reunited his cast of sidemen to issue forth another full-length of brittle, feedback-laden, purely Texan rock and roll. The kind of rock that’s often wrongly referred to as “lo-fi”, when it’s in fact very keenly arranged, but just not any more than it needs to be. “Calling Thermatico” (mp3) appealed to me instantly because of its aural resemblance to “Fuselage”—Johnson’s voice once again straining to accommodate what now sounds like dueling J. Mascises (or is it Mascii?) on guitar, once again culminating with a gorgeous falsetto coda, which thankfully extends to twice the length of its predecessor.

Fort Recovery, which will be a shoo-in for my year end top 50, will be available on March 7 from Misra.

Also at Misra, Drive-by Trucker Patterson Hood's loving appraisal of Fort Recovery, which culminates with:

"Centro-matic's Fort Recovery is a masterpiece, and I don't use that word often".