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Thomas Jones teams up with Kaliburg punk Matt Newell for new album
The Glam Machine is new direction for Art Rock veteran
Kaliburg, Grand Duchy of Ananto
February 18, 5723


Collaboration allows Newell and Jones both to explore new directions

Matt Newell, who has long held a place of honor among the punk scene in Kaliburg, joined forces with long time Art Rocker Thomas Jones to release a new record on KMI called The Glam Machine. This is Newell's first major label release, and Jones' nineth, but the first new music he's put out since 5717's Visions of Dystopia.

"Visions was my step into pop music," said Jones. "It sold a lot of records, but it kind of crushed my soul. Because at heart, I would like people to like what I make, not the other way around, I don't want to make what people like. It's the perennial struggle of the artist, for sure: Create or eat. I'm one of the rare ones who now has enough money so I don't have to choose. I guess Visions... did that for me, so I can't say it was a completely terrible experience."

On collaborating with Jones, Newell was amused. "It's not really something I ever really intended to do, but I met him at a show... I don't know I think I was pretty f--ked up that night. But... so anyway, like my drummer said he told me that Thomas Jones was here and asked if I wanted to meet him, and I think I pretty much made a complete ass of myself. So the next day, before I started my normal routine, I get a call from some dude who says he's Thomas Jones, and he says 'Look, your drummer introduced us last night or whatever, and I was wondering if you wanted to come and make a record together.' And I was like 'Yeah right.' So he gave me this address, and it was KMI and I was like is this dude for real?"

Turns out, Jones has been in what he called a creative "funk" for years and was looking to revitalize his creative energy. "Collaboration with new artists was something that never really occurred to me in the past," Jones said. "I'm a bit of a perfectionist about some things, and working with Matty here was an opportunity to play kind of a more collaborative, supportive role than to always control everything. You have to share creative decision making, which was a newer experience. But the result is really something different, a new direction. And I feel excited about playing music again."

On this record, Newell took up a lot of the song writing duties, while Jones did a lot of the instrumental work and took production duties. "I was challenged to write actual songs," said the punk rocker. "When we go out on stage usually, its all raw power, straight forward rock and roll aggression, simple songs, etc. I brought a lot of that into the studio and Tom was like 'Yeah, so that's like half a verse. Where's the rest of it?' and at first I was saying, 'No man, that's the whole song.' and he would answer 'Yeah, but a song is not just a riff repeated a hundred times in a minute and a half. We need a song.' So I learned a lot about writing, and everything, and I found that there was a lot more I could bring to the project which I didn't even know I had in me."

Newell said that the challenge of actually having to write an album's worth of music, and then the crafting of the work in the recording studio actually forced him to take things a bit more seriously. "I even stayed sober the entire time I was in the studio with Tom," he said. "That was hard, but I knew he had his own thing with drugs, and it was pretty early on when someone was like 'Dude this is like your big chance. Don't blow it over some gak..' Like, keep it together you know... And I did. I'm pretty proud of myself to be honest."

Musically, the album returns to familiar ground for Jones while definitely moving the ball forward from Newell, whose music is often written off in the indie press as "just noise" or "juvenile," or as he puts it, "The best review any of our records ever got was where the girl said 'The best part about this record was that it was so short.' Even I had to laugh at that one." The Glam Machine is labeled as Art Rock, and you can certainly hear Jones' earlier styles here, but inflected by Newell's punk sensibilities.

"I think you might describe it as a return to Jones' Nordhaus days," said critic Allison Wilson, "There are elements of Noise Alternative, electronic, and glam on this record, and the production techniques that Jones used for Nordhaus are in a lot of ways recycled here. I think, however, instead of calling this a conservative choice here, the Nordhaus period was reflective of a time when Jones was going back to fundamentals, and in a lot of ways, that's where punk lives. Working with Newell probably created an opportunity for Jones to pull back from those experiences to create a weird, interesting, and compelling album that I might even refer to as progressive punk more than art or glam."

The most glam that The Glam Machine gets is in the lead single, "We walk like a Ghost." This song has such a driving beat that sounds like a very controlled heartbeat, an irrepressible bassline, and an overly distorted noisy guitar line that sets the stage. It also features Jones on a funky piano that gives the song a swank and a swagger that Jones hasn't displayed in his music since his pre-Nordhaus albums. "Definitely glam all the way down on that one," said Wilson. "The song talks about strutting from club to club in Kaliburg. And the song definitely describes this as a regular activity engaged in by a lot of people, we get the distinct impression that the people they are talking about are glamorous dudes. It's got too much testosterone to be anything but men, and too much sass and pizzaz to be straight."

Jones said, "Yeah, well, Matt wanted to do a glam song, so I said 'you've come to the right place, man.' We came up with the song at a bar in Lolla, where we saw these really macho looking guys just hanging out, and they looked like they were in some kind of of gang or something, they all had like the same kind of clothes on, tight jeans, and shaven heads and mirror sunglasses and shirts that had offensive words on them, and were all doing the same things, and trying to pick up girls and getting shot down because they were just too extra with their 'Look at me, I am a manly man' act. And we wondered like if these guys just all go to bars together, and what they do in secret, like when they don't have their alpha male personality going on. Like do they just walk around Kaliburg from bar to bar and try to pick up the ladies and know they're gonna get shot down because they're just like losers, and so they would rather hang out with one another? It was this whole thing, and we decided we were just going to assume they were all secretly gay, and were just putting on this show for each other so they could prove to one another how not gay they were. This song is definitely about those guys, but I don't think they'll ever listen to it, because glam rock is too gay or something."

The album was generally positively reviewed in the music press, including here, where Wilson called the album "a refreshingly weird outing for both, a little pedestrian for Jones, but by far Newell's best work to date, while the pairing is so seamless that you can definitely hear both artists' influences in each song, and can't imagine the song without both of their influences combined here." The album debuted at #62 on the Radio 1 Album charts, and both Newell and Jones said this was just fine. "I've never had an album in the charts," said Matt Newell, while Thomas Jones said, "Yeah, no more top 10s for me. That's just too much pressure to satisfy the wrong people. I am glad I am feeling refreshed and rested and am happy to be making music for myself again." There's no word about whether there will be a follow up or if this will just be a one off: "It's what we are doing right now," said Jones. His older fans too are just glad to have new music by Jones that largely abandons his forays into pop.

Check out the video for "We Walk Like a Ghost" from the new Newell-Jones album, The Glam Machine, released on KMI.

[Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAxOq_wT2P8]
"We Walk Like a Ghost" from Matt Newell and Thomas Jones' new release The Glam Machine on KMI

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