Brock Potucek

MATTHEW TEARDROP
Drunk as Fuck
self-released

Tired of sons of bitches who “went to a cabin in the woods” to write and record their next album? Matthew Teardrop’s Drunk as Fuck is not that. This is not dream folk. His laments are seasoned with the streets of L.A., rooted in a punk ethos, and with lyrics as specific as a Warren Zevon ballad of self-loathing. “In life, you see, there’s haves and have-nots/and the ones who have also want what you’ve got” he warns us in “Can’t Take It No More,” a song about an everyman getting kicked out of a buddy’s apartment for puking on his couch. The rest of the song has the narrator led afoul by squatters and robbed of his only possession, his backpack—no honor amongst the homeless! This isn’t 99% stuff, it’s the injustice found everywhere, in the personal rather than the political, which is why the marginal and oppressed are such good entertainers. “Artie Lange” takes aim at this extreme, its subject being the Howard Stern comic who stabbed himself in the stomach eighteen times, and survived! If that sad fuck wasn’t passed out, Teardrop reveals, he’d have told his caregivers not to revive his damn self. “Don’t waste your time,” the singer bleeds out like a Southern California strain of romanticism. “I don’t wanna die at Cedars Sinai/breathe my last breaths by the Hollywood sign.” Don’t intervene, just spread his ashes over the loneliest landscape that has any meaning, the Salton Sea. Teardrop normally sings for rockers Manhattan Murder Mystery, who take their name from a Woody Allen film, kind of like how Charles Bukowski said that his favorite author is Dostoyevsky. Well, this is Teardrop’s Notes From the Underground. Drunk as Fuck is Bukowski folk balladry, sad AND funny. The songs are on a quest to connect with humanity. “Got kicked out of the bar cuz I got no money/Now I just wanna say ‘I love you’ to somebody.” Without further ado, let the pathos in.

—Ryan Fuller