Description

Matthew Ryan’s 2008 album is available on CD and ‘DMM’ vinyl.

Throughout his career, Matthew Ryan was often labelled as a heartland rocker in the vein of John Cougar Mellencamp or Bruce Springsteen. But those comparisons have always felt a little superficial, since Ryan was often more likely to explore emotional landscapes than anything you could find on a road map. Often couching his lyrics in quiet and sombre arrangements, Ryan didn’t sing as much as he just lets the rasping vocals seep from his body. On his best songs, such as “Night Watchman” or “Time and Time Only”, the effect is dramatic and haunting.

On this record, he shook things up by collaborating with long-time friends calling themselves the Silver State. A far cry from the combativeness its title suggests, the album finds Ryan and the Silver State complementing each other time and time again.

Tracklist:

1. Dulce Et Decorum Est
2. American Dirt
3. Meet Me By The River
4. It Could’ve Been Worse
5. Hold On Firefly
6. Jane, I Still Feel The Same
7. Killing The Ghost
8. They Were Wrong
9. I Only Want To Be The Man You Want
10. Drunk And Disappointed
11. Closing In

What is DMM?

Direct metal mastering (DMM) is an analogue audio disc mastering technique jointly developed by two German companies, Telefunken-Decca (Teldec) and Georg Neumann GmbH, toward the end of the 20th century after having seen the same technology used by RCA Princeton Labs for its SelectaVision videodiscs in the late-1970s.

Records manufactured with this technology are often marked by a “DMM” logo on the outer record sleeve. Many current production high quality pressings, as well as standard production LPs from the 1990s, only indicate its use by inscribing “DMM” in the lead-out groove area of the disc.

Neumann was responsible for manufacturing the actual DMM cutting equipment as part of its VMS80 series lathes. Unlike conventional disc mastering, where the mechanical audio modulation is cut onto a lacquer-coated aluminium disc, DMM cuts straight into metal (copper), utilizing a high frequency carrier system and specialized diamond styli, vibrating at more than 40 kHz (i.e. 60 kHz) to facilitate the cutting.