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Matmos, "Ultimate Care II"
The way I see it, there are only three possible reactions to the statement "Matmos just made an entire album from recordings of their washing machine."  The first, which was my reaction, is "Yes!"  The other two, of course,  are "Ugh-of course they did." and "Who?"  What I am getting at here is that Ultimate Care II sounds exactly like everyone will expect it to sound, which is (naturally) exactly like a Matmos album: part conceptual art, part bizarro dance party, part abstract experimentation, and part willfully ridiculous (they let the actual rinse cycle play out unmolested for several minutes at one point).  The only real surprise for me was that Ultimate Care II is just a single extended piece that loosely mirrors the stages of a single wash cycle.  That one piece covers a lot of strange and varied stylistic ground, however, veering wildly from pummeling junkyard percussion to Looney Tunes to musique concrète to Love's Secret Domain-era Coil within a single 38-minute span.  Predictably, it is a wild ride indeed and precisely the type of album that no one but Matmos could (or would) ever make.
While Ultimate Care II is unquestionably a quintessential "Matmos" album, Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt did not make it alone, enlisting the aid of several guests from around the Baltimore area including Dan Deacon and members of Horse Lords, Needle Gun, and Half Japanese.  To their credit, some of the guests even earned some serious washing machine cred beforehand by periodically doing their laundry at the Matmos house.  Aside from generally being a fun project, the involvement of so many people in this quixotic endeavor served a practical purpose as well: every sound on Ultimate Care comes from the washing machine itself, so recruiting talented collaborators was a useful way of coming up with enough interesting ideas to fill an album.  Unsurprisingly, quite a few of the sounds on Ultimate Care sound recognizably like a washing machine, while many others exploit the machine’s rich percussive potential.  Then, of course, there are many others that veer so far off the tracks that it is hard to believe their origin.
The magic, of course, lies in how those myriad sounds are combined and how all the various motifs evolve into one another.  Many of the best parts sound positively raucous, as the duo prove particularly adept at combining stomping and plinking rhythms into a fun quasi-industrial dance party.  Also, the crazier and wonkier the grooves get, the better.  Most of Ultimate Care’s best moments occur when Schmidt and Daniel settle into a weirdly funky and stumbling groove filled with kooky bleeps and buzzes.  Infectious rhythms aside, the other highlights tend to be the gutsier and/or more surprising moments.  For example, there is an admittedly non-gutsy, yet completely unexpected interlude where the piece coheres into an absolutely beautiful passage that resembles a haunting glass harmonica performance.  More frequently, however, Ultimate Care reaches its greatest heights when it just gets go-for-broke bonkers.  Like, for example, when it sounds like jungle-themed exotica made by a mental patient.  That thankfully happens more than once and it is absolutely glorious every time.
Of course, not every idea that found its way onto Ultimate Care was entirely brilliant.  Some of the more straightforwardly pummeling percussion passages definitely left me a bit cold, as they are a bit too bombastic for such a fundamentally absurd venture.  Admittedly, they can be quite visceral, but I do not like Matmos because they can sound like Test Dept. if they want to–I like them because they are imaginative and unique.  I was also not wild about a blurting passage that sounded like a computer throwing up, as it was only interesting because it was made from a washing machine.  Conversely, however, I actually did enjoying the few sections that basically sounded like untreated washing machine recordings.  In my defense, if washing machines did not sound cool, Matmos probably would not have made this album.  I am not ruling out the possibility that I am becoming an easily amused simpleton, however.  In any case, the good parts far outweigh the bad and none of the weaker moments stick around for long.  Also, I would be crazy to expect a flawless, seamless longform composition made from a goddamn washing machine: Daniel and Schmidt are primarily experimenters and Ultimate Care is essentially a series of wild set pieces that flow together surprisingly well.  I am sure there will be plenty of better compositions this year than Ultimate Care, but I doubt many of them will rack up quite as many memorable highlights along the way.
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