MATRIX METALS “TANNING SALON, PART TWO” from OESB // FUTURE SOUND on Vimeo.

Sam Meringue’s Matrix Metals project has been the extra cheese for pizza-sticky blogger fingers everywhere since Not Not Fun dropped it as a tape last spring, and pretty much everybody who writes about it has been singing the same tune: if all the artists in David Keenan’s h-pop pantheon got together and threw a party in a Malibu Hilton Hotel lobby circa 1985, Flamingo Breeze is what that party would sound like — plastic Piña Colada glasses, lopsided Monet posters, hallucinated DJ “take-overs” and all. And I used to agree entirely, until this new video by Luke Wyatt made me realize that the album’s closing track kind of pulls that swirling neon vision right out from under you. “Tanning Salon” is the killer hangover that comes with the dawn: we are still at the Hilton, but the ice sculptures have collapsed into puddles, the guests have all come and gone, and the hallucinated 45-year-old trophy wife who glided through the ballroom like an extra in a David Lynch film is lying inside the sensory deprivation chamber of a tanning booth, alone with her darkest thoughts as her 97-year-old husband takes a dip in the pool. Memories can really be quite horrific, when the last five years of your life get jammed in the VCR. And I’m afraid, Lady in Red, that you only looked real with your make-up on.
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