Emperor X is a digitally rendered audio version of an anthropomorphic animal who plays tricks and disobeys the normal rules of society. On The Orlando Sentinel, Emperor X is wearing a shaman’s mask and telling some harsh truths without writing a single word, synth hook, or guitar line in anger. Emperor X is a punk trickster, an EDM DJ, and a first-rate singer/songwriter. He’s laughing with us, and laughing at some of us over the mess we’ve collectively made. Rage with a sense of humor- such is the life of the digital shaman.
In other words: underneath the layers of techno, occasional Spanish guitar, Afro-Pop, and punk folk, The Orlando Sentinel is a continuation of Chad Matheny’s tradition of writing socially, politically, and sonically subversive music.
The lyrical themes that run across the fourteen tracks on The Orlando Sentinel blend romantic, political, and socio-economic vignettes that could be clipped from an online newspaper, or a heartbreaking entry in a personal journal. The album is a statement about emotional deficits and economic inequities, without a trace of bitterness, but with a fair dose of disappointment and self doubt. Some of the lyrical themes might seem at odds with the music as techno, punk folk, pop, and ambient songs, ricochet off one another and the narrative switches back and forth from stock market overlords, to broken relationships, and global political alliances.
Because it’s all fucking connected, man.
The song titles on The Orlando Sentinel are provocative, while bordering on ambiguous. The opener, ‘Fierce Resource Allocation’ is a piece of aggressive, yet poppy, techno- with the chorus, “We die young, we die fearless, we die with resources, we die with integrity.” The lyrics can be intense- and I don’t know anyone else that could write a chorus around a line that celebrates bureaucracy like: “Go Populate, Go fill out forms, Go rave, Go rave, Go rave” (‘At a Rave with Nicolas Sarkozy’).
In parallel to the harsh realities of politics, the environment, and the global economy described on the album, Emperor X also writes some very abstract love/anti-love songs, and on The Orlando Sentinel the digital shaman occasionally drops the mask and you might actually see a tear in his eye. ‘H.M.S. Blank Mediterranean’ tells two stories, one is a breakup bummer jam that’s a meditation on a meeting and a parting of ways, and the other is a tale of helping his mother fill out forms for government medical assistance. The verses interweave these two stories brilliantly and seamlessly, creating a narrative of random people that you love with conditions, and those that you love unconditionally. ‘Blank Mediterranean’ is a commentary on both social programs and the spectrum of awkward relationships. And it’s set to a killer beat. ‘Swim Laws’ provides another view of human frailty and also shows the depth and maturity of Matheny’s songwriting.
The lyrics, arrangements, and beats on The Orlando Sentinel are equally engaging. Emperor X has always produced beat driven albums, and the hard injection of EDM on this one takes things up a notch compared to earlier works. The album plays very much like an autobiographical DJ set. Songs are given space and breaks by a series of short-form works of electronica and ambient music with titles given the prefix “Ring”. These interstitial pieces range from 42 seconds to past the 2-minute mark and stand well as solid arrangements and performances on their own. Matheny is an innovative beat-maker, which stands out most prominently on ‘Caricom –Lagos version’, where an Afro-Pop beat during the verse collides with hardcore punk thrash during the chorus, a juxtaposition that he pulls off almost effortlessly.
Emperor X has gained a reputation as an innovative recording engineer, and Matheny is at his best on The Orlando Sentinel. Lush recordings like ‘H.M.S. Blank Mediterranean,’ ‘Repo Browser vs- Schengen Overstay,’ and ‘Swim Laws’ fit perfectly, yet in sharp contrast with the lo-fi recordings of ‘Daytrader Stadium’ and ‘Proving The Politburo Right.’ ‘Politburo’ is one of my personal favorites on the album for the lyrical content, cultural context, and lo-fi field recording. The throbbing-to-the-point-of-distortion-clipping bass, creates the feel of being inside a club that’s blasting techno at deafening levels. In this case, Matheny recorded the song by literally running around a Berlin dance club at 05:00 with a handheld digital recorder. Free-styled lyrics are shouted as he looks out over a city that once defined both capitalism and communism, while chanting, “This is what we do with our freedom, this is how we spend our capital…” before dropping into a completely buckled version of 'Bizarre Love Triangle' cranking in the background. This is one of the best examples on record of how to wreck the sonics of a song as a means to deconstructing a political philosophy AND a set of human emotional responses that we, as a species, are continually in the process of just trying to fucking sort out.
