What's The Matter, M Ross? (Bouquet Blast Vinyl)

What’s the Matter, M Ross?, the third installment from the idiosyncratic M Ross Perkins, finds our boy on an inward journey, exploring the transcendental and existential with his most lyrically confessional album to date. It’s a record that serves notice that multi-instrumentalist Perkins belongs amongst the singer/songwriter zeitgeist that has swooned over MJ Lenderman and Waxahatchee while serving as a conduit to optimism. 

Composed, performed, and recorded completely by Perkins in his Dayton, OH studio, What’s the Matter… is both the most stripped down and expansive within his tryptic of albums. The headphone symphonies move with a deliberate, composed sophistication while the lyrics explore fresh territory, turning the camera away from the “butterscotch revue” and pointing it into a mirror. "The touchstones of psych pop remain: flourishes of Nilsson are still here, but so are Gram Parsons and Jonathan Richman. If you want to assign geography to What’s the Matter, M Ross?, the album is equal parts Laurel Canyon and Big Pink, more Woodstock the town than the festival. Perkins is a self-contained (late-period) Teenage Fanclub with George Harrison’s spiritual sense of inner wanderlust.

Jonathan Richman once said, “Poetry, if you love it, it works its way into your conversations and into anything you do.” Perkins’ new album is replete with the poetry of creation and living, signaling a sea change in how he writes and creates music. That end yield can be heard in the album’s lead track “Hey Man/Hey Self,” a song that marries signature Perkins’ ear for a cosmic pop hook with the contemplative.

“I am a filter for raw experience,” explains Perkins. It’s a thought that provides a window into his artistic process, which evolved between his Karma Chief debut and What’s the Matter, M Ross? He continues, “The writer puts one hand on the universe — the bare wire — and puts [the other hand] on the shoulder of the human being, the listener/the reader, and just acts as this conduit between some reality undistilled that becomes consumable through this filter of my consciousness.”

In the end, What’s the Matter, M Ross? understands that a conduit is a two-way street. Perkins hopes that his listeners share in that transformative power. “Throughout writing, recording, while doing vocals and singing, there would be moments, throughout every one of those stages… I would be thinking [about people like] that dude who came up to me in Lexington and told me [that my songs] really helped him,” says Perkins. “Everything I’m doing while cutting that vocal was channeling [him]..to tell him that everything is going to be all right… I was closing my eyes holding you in my mind while I sang this song knowing that it would do something for you… That dude is going to hear [this album] and have no idea what he’s listening to is literally me signing to him.”