MATTRESS in the press
Willamette Week Album Review: Low Blows
[DAMAGED CROON] It's hard to avoid the dreaded second-album slump, especially when many of the faults often associated with it — added band members, an expanded instrumental palette — are in play. And on Low Blows, Rex Marshall's sequel of sorts to 2008's bleak, beat-centric Heavy Duty, things have changed. Marshall, who used to perform accompanied only by a tape deck, now has a drummer and plays (gasp!) guitar. His arrangements have gained a sprightly, jaunty step to them, as if Mattress has "found its groove." But at the base of every song is what makes you love (or hate) the man: Marshall's deep, ominous, claustrophobic croon.
Low Blows finds Marshall trafficking in gritty, chunky beats, with an emphasis on his sound's low end and an increasing reliance on guitar stabs on tracks like "Light My Life." Mixed by Jay Winebrenner (31Knots) and Jesse Hall (Experimental Dental School), the record has a homespun, distant feel, but it's warmer than its predecessor — aided by live drums and keys on opener "They Like You" and the dancey "Gone to Waste." Low Blows contains a few certifiable bangers, notably "Roll Roll Roll," which opens with one of Marshall's best lines ("Rock, paper, scissors, gold/ Stuff the pockets in your soul") and includes his most impassioned vocal takes.
And it's that voice — which falls somewhere between the conversational speech of an undertaker and a preserved '50s lounge singer unfrozen during the apocalypse — that makes these songs tick. I guess an instrument this unique is immune to the sophomore slump. MICHAEL MANNHEIMER
read the review @ Willamette Week
The Portland Mercury
"After Ian Curtis met his fate at the end of a dangling rope, lesser artists were quick to pick over the bones of Joy Division's remains, and thus a seemingly endless genre was born of dour keyboard lines, overtly dark lyrics, and rigid deep-voiced singers desperately trying to stay in character. At first listen, Mattress comes off as just another in a long line of creatively bankrupt musicians searching for unknown pleasures in the shadow of Curtis. But on the just-released Low Blows, main Mattress-er Rex Marshall breaks from the pack of bottom-feeding electro-popsters and creates a texturally precise and dramatic recording of songs that accentuate his cavernous vocal range, slurring lounge singer delivery, and stark musical backing. It's never an easy—or uplifting—listen, but Marshall seems to take a twisted pride in dragging the listener hand in hand through his dark personal catharsis, proving that, as an artist, he's no mere clone from a bygone era." EZRA ACE CARAEFF
Still Single
"Legitimate minimal synth gets recorded, and the tapes are left to melt in a hot car like a Snickers. That's the figurative M.O. of Rex Marshall, as Mattress – genuine weirdness, besmirched by these times of shitty lo-fi crap, but coming out as its own thing. Marshall employs that sort of vocal blandishment like Jon Glaser on TV's "Delocated," which informs the martial, clampdown synthesizer in long, arduous strokes, and plays more like one in a long line of isolationist innovators, from the Xex people to John Bender and Neil Hamburger. There's a little bit of sleaziness to the whole thing, like it could slip into some seedy, non-existent cocktail lounge or the middle of a Ween record, that really helps you notice that Marshall has written real songs and is not just dicking around with spontaneous, uninspired notions. Favorites are "Gone to Waste," a hipgrinder out of DEVO Corporate Headquarters, and "Roll Roll Roll," which sounds like a Cars record baked into one of those record bowls from, like, Readymade magazine, and gets satisfyingly crunchy at the end. Bottom line is that the songs are great, and the delivery funny and weird, but with confidence. Put down the Digital Leather records and step to the real. 500 copies, clear vinyl." Doug Mosurock
read the review @ Still Single
Willamette Week Album Review
I feel like Malt Duck is a label stringing us along, waiting for the right moment (perhaps 2010) to take over this whole game. Though they've been quite unprolific so far, what they have given are a handful of records that seem constructed with the utmost precision and creepiest of intentions. These aren't records you put on in polite company, nor are they anything that would scare off the family pet or toil in minutes of monotony and noise for noise sake. Still, there's something off about each. Now, right as we're about to delve into delirious fits of winter hell, Portland's Mattress decides to release Low Blows, the debut long-player for this one-man project. Perfect timing as I'll need this basement-dwelling electronic weltering to counter the bleak tundra outside.
Rex Marshall assumes the role of Mattress and is responsible for all the lurid blips and skank beats you'll hear on Low Blows. In a method similar to Mike Sniper becoming Blank Dogs after the midnight hour, Marshall's teen-wolf transformation should have Sniper kicking himself because Mattress has the cold-wave mastered down to a science—as if he's high on the elixir of an Eastern European cave-rave, where depression and Suicide are cocktails instead of life choices. "Stay Poor," for example, might be vamped to lounge extremes, like the soundtrack to a Bela Tarr documentary on the sub-Ljubljana karaoke scene, but it also gains dancefloor traction with specks of confetti-sized illumination in the dead battery strobe. Marshall's Nyquil-coated bellow is excruciating and addiction forming. On "Gone to Waste," especially, there's a constant "Mephistopheles loaded on pills" vibe that draws you back with loaded blurts and the promise of trashy lot lizards and trashier shots. In every instance of his exaggerated muscle-memory loss, there's an inkling of inflated class. Sure he's sloth and gluttony incarnate, but you can't wait till the next time you get to hang.
The favorite moment of Low Blows occurs on "No More Try." This song, Marshall's farthest reaching "industrial" melee, proves he has absolute rule over his machines. It's just that his trigger finger is either noticeably absent or held down with medical tape (on the lowest rung of the synth). I'm assuming it's both the sustained restraint and brief tumbles of excess that make the record so intriguing. If you're a veteran of pigfuck, you may think you've heard it all before. Sure, this has plenty of sleaze (I had originally thought Mattress originated in Texas) and it drips with a heavy film of concentrated grease. But all of the slurred beauty and dark arts that appear to exist in Mattress' bag of tricks is some kind of nth wave charred to white-hot bone ash— just enough so you're not choking on it. Kevin J. Elliott
read the review @ The Agit Reader
SentireAscoltare
Rex Marshall, stage name Mattress, is an obscure character. He comes from Portland, and if this alone says something, he's a loner, not inclined to trends or fashion. As a true one-man project, Rex do it himself without need of too much clamor: from 2006 he releases 7" and Cd-R and Low Blows is the second album after the debut Heavy Duty on Reluctant Recordings. It starts from the voice, a dark and baritone crooning that remembers, from time to time, Ian Curtis or Jim Morrison. It's surrounded by not much else: a synth, that is used like a real piano, and few crazy bits of guitar to emphasize the most pressing parts.
Without forgetting the most accessible moments (Light My Life, Gone To Waste), the true novelty in this work is the dramatic and lyrical component, stressed and emphasized like only in the hit Eldorado before. Roll Roll Roll, Remember and Stay Poor stir gloomy ghosts in the air, probably the same whose hands we see in the record's cover. The printing on transparent vinyl and the insertion of some of the lyrics seal one of the most interesting releases in the last months.
read the review @ SentireAscoltare
Mattress: In Your Pocket EP + CDR (Malt Duck)
"Severe and bleak are the words which best describe the debut record for both label Malt Duck and Portland's Mattress, a 2-song 7" stuffed with a CDR of the two sides along with an additional two songs. I've been scratching my head for days over this, and when I read someone refer to Mattress as the perfect fusion of early-Smog, Nick Cave and Suicide, I couldn't help but to let out a big sigh of relief. Genius! Thank you! I couldn't have said it any better. Mattress skillfully fuses the three into a strangely exciting new sound within the simple play of crude synth and soulful crooning. Severe and bleak — but I keep coming back to it. Hopefully this is just the first of many for both parties." —Sean Wright of Z-gun
"If Nick Cave had a bad dream with Suicide on the soundtrack. Over modest electronic
backing Mattress reminds us that we can still sing without sounding garish or
insincere. The sort of thing that's eerily romantic and irresistibly weird. Almost
warrants use of the word "important." Right now it looks like his only release
is available via Malt Duck Records."
—from Sunshine
and Grease by Connor Morris, 9/23/2007
"If you like your dance jams flavored with a spicy, tasty hint of "crazy," then Mattress is your new boyfriend and he's gonna straight kick your old boyfriend's ass back to the Stone Age. Like Quintron, Mattress' version of dance is hectic, thrilling, and full of sweet-ass crooner howls. And this is all coming from a guy with a bona fide noise background, making Mattress' music totally un-clichéd and totally refreshing.
—Grant Morris, The Portland Mercury October 12, 2006