Album Notes

Matty Charles & the Valentines mine American country, folk, and popular music to create a sometimes spare, sometimes lush follow-up to their first record. Well considered tones and lyrics come together to bring the listener into a world of musical melancholy.

Here's what splendidzine.com had to say about Land Beyond the Sea:

Brooklyn is probably the last place you'd expect to find a fine, traditional country swing/rockabilly trio, but that's where these guys are based. It somehow seems appropriate that they could have come from just about anywhere, for their album sounds delightfully out of time. Running through ten scaled-down, charmingly modest originals, Land Beyond the Sea effortlessly captures that all-too-rare vibe of three people playing together without flash or pretension.

Charles's plaintive, mournful voice draws as much from country stalwarts like Merle Haggard as it does from non-country singer/songwriters such as Jackson Browne and Nebraska-era Bruce Springsteen (maybe even a little Bruce Hornsby as well). His occasional guitar solos are brief, clean and not overly twangy, and his playing never distracts from the songs themselves. With ample support from upright bassist Josh Stark and seamless brushwork from drummer DJ Mendel, he delivers the requisite stark reminisces and heartsick laments you'd expect from the genre, but he does so with admirable restraint.

The album has its share of sprightly acoustic romps, like the breathless opener "Long Gone" and the amusingly dry, Bible-referencing title track (choice couplet: "Eve said Adam now you tasted my apple / and you have to marry me / the Lord got mad, said you can't come back / to the land beyond the sea"). However, unhurried, more reflective numbers dominate, and they're effective without slowing the album down. The guitar-and-voice "Always Something New" and the closing, harmonica-accented "Lonesome Lull" are deftly spare and all the more powerful for it; accordion and backing vocals from Cynthia Hopkins make for sweet, unobtrusive enhancements to the waltz-tempo "Sister May"; with a little pedal steel, "At The Pictureshow" exudes a nice reverence for its subject, conjuring up the melancholy and poignancy of The Last Picture Show without seeming corny or calculated.

As simple as it seems, not everyone can pull off this sort of stuff. A song with a title like "Mama, I Don't Wanna Go Insane" could've been a cheap white trash parody, but in Charles's hands, it's just another eloquently expressed rumination about being unlucky in love. It's a pretty great title, too. Charles and The Valentines don't really add anything new to the genre they've adopted, but that's not much of a problem when they sound this genuine.

Here's what Country Standard Time had to say about Land Beyond the Sea :

" Matty Charles' languorous singing and the band's sparse arrangements create the sort of quiet-as-loud sound that causes listeners to lean in ... The lineup of guitar, drums and acoustic bass leaves the songs to turn on the lyrics tumbling from Charles' mouth, punctuated occasionally by pedal steel or a tasteful guitar solo. Charles writes with the broadness of his heroes, Nelson, Earle and Waits, but his singing edges towards the gravity of Waylon Jennings, the melancholy of Richard Buckner and the wordy, poetic edge of Kris Kristofferson or Paul Simon.
Many of Charles' songs are internal monologues, wandering through a Gram Parsons-like desert demise ("Long Gone"), confessing weakness ("Where They'll Bury Me") and communing with film classics ("At the Pictureshow"). Time-tested topics such as love ("Lover's Lane" "Valentine Song"), romantic doubt ("Lonesome Lull") and shattered relationships ("Mama, I Don't Wanna Go Insane") are renewed by Charles earnestness and the band's intimate backings. The most time-tested of tales, Adam & Eve's exodus from the Garden of Eden, anchors the album's bouncy title tune.
This record doesn't try to grab you with flashy picking or overproduced multi-tracking. But that's exactly its charm: lyrical and musical depth couched in a folksy, subtle presentation that reveals (rather than announces) itself. "
- Eli Messinger