Mat Kearney (Bullet) :: Deeper Devotion

By Todd Kavanaugh

Artist: Mat Kearney

Site: www.matkearney.com
Album: Bullet
Label: Inpop
Release: 2004
Type: Rap/Hip-Hop/Folk/Rock

If you like: Black-Eyed-Peas, Beck, Coldplay
Rating: 5/5

I can count on just one hand—in fact I don’t even need a whole hand—to count the amount of Hip/Hop/Rap albums that I have purchased in my life. So when I actually couldn’t put this album down for a few weeks I was most incredibly astonished, as well as slightly optimistic, that perhaps maybe, just maybe my musical appreciation might actually be expanding.

Mat Kearney is an artist that has successfully managed to find a home between two very different styles of music pulling from numerous camps to provide the listener with an experience of a very unique blend of Hip/Hop, Folk/Rock, and Acoustic ballads. Even considering such a project has probably halted manymusical dreamers in the past, but Mat Kearney has done it with what sounds like such apparent ease

Imagine with me for a moment you are listening to Black Eyed Peas and perhaps suddenly at the chorus a fitting melody sung by Chris Martin of Coldplay is effortlessly interwoven into the driving hip-hop beats and rhymes. As the song transitions into a thought provoking and day dream inducing flow of vocals and masterfully matched instrumentation of acoustic guitar, piano, harmonica, and strings and then in but a moment you are pulled back into the driving rhythms of Mat Kearney’s rhymes. Interlaced throughout the album are not only songs as described above, but songs like “Girl America” leaning more closely to something you would expect from a Hip/Hop artist, and then gracefully caught up in the artful vocals and piano of “Won’t Back Down.”

Mat Kearney has executed the music of “Bullet” with very apparent precision, but most certainly not at the cost of content. One is immediately confronted with Mat’s vocal and public profession of where he stands with God in the opening track “Trainwreck”:

“Now watch me climb my own cross
Without a loss for these words
As I motion a moment’s silence
Let it fly with the birds

All else I got without you
Is much ado about nothing
I’d rather stand by you gone

Than on the throne of another”

The listener is also confronted with potent imagery invoking painful memories of Mat’s past as well as his passions and hopes for the future of not only himself, but those also of the world around him. Mat’s lyrics cry out for the hopeless in “Tomorrow.” As Mat weaves words together in unison with the tracks laid down the listener can’t help but begin to feel challenged by the words that he speaks as he does in “Won’t Back Down”:

“Hallelujah ripped through my veins

I heard the hammer drop
My blood in the rain

Hallelujah came like a train
When all is lost
All is left to gain…Hallelujah”

If you can be encouraged to pick up one album this week, month or whenever Mat Kearney’s “Bullet” should be at the very top of the list. The depth of lyrics, and variety of musical moods,will most certainly not let you down.

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