“Love To Get Used” – Matt Pond PA
Matt Pond PA isn’t going anywhere. Thankfully. Indie rock stalwarts who precede the MP3 age (just barely), the group has been through many iterations (Matt Pond himself is the only member remaining from the 1998 version), has recorded eight albums and, now, eight EPs. And I’m not sure they’ve ever sounded better than this. (Which is saying something; they had already been featured four times here, all for excellent songs.)
Launched off a stomping drumbeat and a wiggle of a guitar lick, “Love To Get Used” is all sinew and punch, its brisk, no-nonsense verse building knowingly into a chorus nearly addictive in its catchiness. Normally, I listen to these songs over and over as I’m getting to know them and beginning to write about them, but this one, yikes, someone’s gonna have to yank the plug on me. I think I’ve listened about 900 times by now; I’m such a sucker for melodies that repeat over a changing series of chords. The song has the churning, organic drive of something from a mid-’70s Fleetwood Mac album; 19-year-old Ariel Abshire even stops in to play Stevie Nicks to Pond’s Lindsey Buckingham. Not that Pond sounds anything like LB, mind you; he has in fact long had one of my favorite 21st-century rock’n’roll voices—at once warm and weathered, with an elusive range and a distinctive timbre. (I had more to say about this last time the band was featured, in January 2010.)
“Love To Get Used” is the lead track from the band’s just-released EP, Spring Fools, which you can buy either digitally or physically, via Altitude Records, which appears to be the band’s label although it doesn’t say so anywhere. MP3 via Spinner.
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