Year Gone By
PSCD2101 - CD, download
released 2/12/2021
Before the plague, there was music. Night clubs all over the world featured live bands that actually played real instruments and people would come and dig and dance and enjoy. One of those bands was called The Last—a fabulously rockin' ensemble that has existed in one form or another since 1976. One of its founding members was Vitus Mataré—a talented chap known mostly as keyboard player, but he's also a guitarist, singer, songwriter, producer, sound engineer . . . and he can even play the flute! Although few of his songs were recorded by The Last, Mr. Mataré's “Up in the Air” is one of the group's best.
John Rosewall was also a member of The Last during the early eighties. He played bass on the album Painting Smiles on a Dead Man and performed many great live shows with the band. After he and Mr. Mataré left The Last around 1985, they formed Danny & the Doorknobs with members of The Urinals, Leaving Trains and Slovenly. Danny & the Doorknobs soon became Trotsky Icepick and made records for SST Records.
Danny Frankel is one of the most sought-after percussionists in Los Angeles. He got a jump start in the music business as the drummer of Urban Verbs, a CBGBs-era New Wave band that issued two LPs on Warner Bros. Since then, he has played on nearly 200 recordings—including those by Victoria Williams, John Cale, Morris Tepper, April March, Beck, Fiona Apple, Nels Cline, D.J. Bonebrake, k.d. lang, Marianne Faithfull, Cindy Lee Berryhill, Spain (with Josh Haden) and a ton of other super-talented folk. For several years, Mr. Frankel was Lou Reed's touring drummer. Around 1990, Mr. Frankel was enlisted for his percussion expertise at a recording session that was being produced by Mr. Mataré; They became friends, promising each other to work together on a project some day.
That project is here: PETRIFIED MAX. These three music veterans have produced a terrific new album called Year Gone By. The songs are great—solid rock with catchy melodies; the kind that will leave you humming them all day—especially “Make Believe” and “Get the Guitar”. Opening track “Sipping the Moon” and “Blue Skies Always” feature boss guitar riffs. “Quentin's Stroll” is a moody instrumental—the kind nobody creates anymore. This stuff is G-O-O-D, good and so deserving of repeated listenings.
When the plague is over, PETRIFIED MAX is hoping to grab their real instruments and play live gigs and tour all over the world. If this band comes to your town, you absolutely must see it. You will dig and dance and enjoy!
--Phast Phreddie Patterson
Charlie Drove North
PSCD2001 – CD, download
Released: 6/30/2020
Longtime bandmates Vitus Mataré and John Rosewall have teamed up once again in Petrified Max, a new collaboration which also includes percussionist Danny Frankel.
Mataré and Rosewall met in Los Angeles' historic pop/punk unit The Last, where Mataré held down keyboard and songwriting duties while Rosewall played bass. They later joined forces in Mataré's pop-inflected postpunk outfit Trotsky Icepick, which released numerous recordings on Black Flag's fabled SST Records and shared bills with college radio stars like The Dream Syndicate, Meat Puppets, Firehose, Camper Van Beethoven, and Dinosaur Jr. After dissolution and a hiatus, in 2011 Mataré's Trotsky came roaring back to life, gigging around L.A. and eventually releasing new material. Meanwhile, after a lengthy break from music altogether, in 2018 Rosewall picked up a guitar and phoned his old friend Mataré. It wasn't long before the two had dreamed up Petrified Max and booked studio time.
In this new collaboration, Mataré and Rosewall share songwriting and production duties. Mataré handles the vocals, and plays rhythm guitar and keyboards, while Rosewall mans lead and rhythm guitars as well as bass. To round things off on drums and percussion, the two have enlisted another old friend, Danny Frankel, who has worked with the legendary Lou Reed, producer Hal Willner, and an astonishing array of other musical powerhouses, in addition to his many solo projects. PMax's first album, Charlie Drove North, was recorded at Long Beach's Jazzcats Studio by owner/engineer Jonny Bell, of Crystal Antlers fame.
The eleven tunes on Charlie Drove North range from Mataré's utterly unique “The Bat Whispers” and his chilling “Length of Rope,” to Rosewall's more straight-ahead rockers “Hole in the Sky” and “Three Times Gone.” Co-written songs also appear, such as the haunting “Acres,” the self-explanatory “Power Pop Heart,” and the crunchy guitar number “Basic.” The Petrified Max sound is a seamless integration of Mataré and Rosewall's diverse influences, which include British invasion, sixties garage, and psychedelia; harder edged, blues-influenced guitar rock; and the postpunk sounds that both musicians helped to create in the first place.
Petrified Max can be contacted through:
Poison Summer Records – www.poisonsummerrecords.com
Bandcamp – www.poisonsummerrecords.bandcamp.com or
www.petrifiedmax.bandcamp.com
