Mat Riviere/ Follow Your Heart

Mat Riviere
Follow Your Heart
(Brainlove)

An unpromising opening drone fills my headphones. It fills the internal passageways of my ears. Fills my sinuses. Fills me with the fear of an album that is one extended dirge. And then the melody kicks in – slow, sparse and simple. The fear subsides a little. This could build into something interesting, and rather lovely. But will it? Will it?
Let me put you out your misery. It won't. The most accurate way to describe this album is as a scrap book: every track sounds like an interesting introductory melody that's been robbed of any development, and instead painfully stretched out to upwards of four minutes. Drone leads to yet more drone.
The most bearable track is ‘Evening Drive’ but the listener is distracted from the bleak vocals and sinister video-game jungle percussion by the fact Mat Riviere appears to have left a generator on.
As the album wears on, each track becomes utterly predictable; Follow Your Heart is the art of playing it safe taken to its logical and terrible conclusion. And why, for the love of God, does it need a digital handclap?