Chase Matthew - Come Get Your Memory
By Holly Smith
When you put out an album that is 25 songs long, those songs have to justify themselves. On Chase Matthew’s new album, Come Get Your Memory, sadly the balance skews towards unjustified and formulaic.
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Chase Matthew - Come Get Your Memory
Label: Warner Music Nashville
Release Date: June 9, 2023
Producers: Austin Shawn, Jason Haag, Casey Brown, Brock Berryhill, Alysa Vanderhym
Tracklisting:
1. Blink
2. Come Get Your Memory
3. Do All Dogs Go To Heaven
4. Do Me Like That
5. Downtown
6. Fall For Those I’s
7. Fine By Me
8. Girl I Know
9. Good Day For A Heartbreak
10. Good Time To Go
11. Hey Montana
12. Love You Again
13. Loving You Is Like
14. Make a Memory
15. Moonlight
16. My Drinking Song
17. Never Change
18. Nothing To Do With Me
19. Outlaw Gospel
20. Rainy Days
21. Saw Me Here
22. Somebody Else’s Truck
23. The Way I Am
24. This Ain’t Working
25. Where There’s Smoke
Record labels and artists can learn a lot from streaming services and their reliance on formulas. The buck-stopping issue, one that streamers now reckon with as they rapidly lose subscribers amidst accusations of bloated and unoriginal content, is that tastes change, and with them formulas have to change too.
To generate those formulas, you need to invest in original content alongside the tested and true. Most importantly, formulas have to be applied to actual people. And people have increasingly short attention spans. So, when you put out an album that is 25 songs long, those songs have to justify themselves.
On Chase Matthew’s new album, Come Get Your Memory, sadly the balance skews towards unjustified and formulaic. There are snatches of genuine emotion and real sentiment here. You’ll hear some of it on songs like ‘Hey Montana’, ‘Rainy Days’ or ‘Saw Me Here’. There’s wordplay to catch the ear on ‘Fall For Those I’s’, vocal texture on ‘My Drinking Song’, and intriguing lyrical speed on Ernest co-write ‘Fine By Me’.
But there is no good reason for this album to be 25 songs long. All it achieves is burying what’s true and interesting in song after song of sameness.
You get the feel of an original album at 12 or 13 tracks long with each song then rewritten slightly differently and placed on top. It’s so unspecific, filled with the usual arbitrary references to neon lights, boys, beer, and a faceless woman at the heart of it all. Call me unromantic but I don’t think I’d be wooed by a man telling me “You’re the kingsize I wanna be on”, as Chase does on ‘Love You Again’, mainly because…what?
‘Somebody Else’s Truck’ has the vibe of an AI going through the thought process of writing a country song: “I know you’re a country girl so If I had one guess at where you are, you’re probably on the passenger side of a four wheel drive” and “he’s probably got his baseball cap either on you or up on the dash.”
Maybe this album will be a hit. It’s had a decent start at country radio. With 25 songs to choose from perhaps the winning formula will work again. But a more winning formula would be for Chase to keep it real. Not everyone has to reinvent the wheel, but at least an attempt to steer it down an untrodden path never goes amiss.
3/10
Chase Matthew's 2023 album, Come Get Your Memory, is out on June 9th via Warner Music Nashville.
