As Matson Jones sent its pulsating waves of cello-rock through an adoring Hi-Dive crowd that was pushing as close to the stage as they could, one woman stood alone in a back corner, lost in a kind of angry abandon.
“What have you done with the one I love?” vocalist Martina Grbac demanded on the chillingly titled “Sympathy,” a potent song about devils disguised as angels living in our midst. Grbac and Anna Mascorella were tearing into their cello strings in ways Andrea Amati never imagined for his invention 470 years ago. Matt Regan provided a driving upright-bass line, and Ross Harada’s relentless drumming gave the lament a throbbing, punk-rock intensity.
This woman, who appeared to be in her mid-30s – old enough to have met a fallen angel or two along her way – swayed back and forth to the frenetic beat in her dress, drink in one hand and cigarette in the other. Her head was tilted back, her eyes focused not on the band but closed and arced toward the heavens. It was not as if she were giving herself up to the Lord. It was as if she had just been released from her pain.
Tears ran down her face and into her smile.
There were many signs in the past year that Matson Jones, an orchestral-art rock quartet from Fort Collins, was breaking out: A national distribution deal for its debut CD. Named spin.com’s “band of the day.” A No.8 ranking on the national tracking of college radio playlists. Media coverage. Opening for the Dresden Dolls. A 15-passenger Dodge Ram 3500 they call the White Tiger. Now they have been voted Colorado’s best underground band by a Denver Post panel of 49 experts on the area music scene.
But Matson Jones’ arrival may have been most evident in this one moment, when the band members were too deep in their own performance trance to notice that the friction from their bows on strings was shooting a flaming emotional arrow deep into the heart of this lone woman who was dancing and weeping at once.
Yes, Matson Jones has made an impact in its two short years.
“When we are performing and become totally immersed in a song, that’s when I feel we are most efficiently and effectively conveying what it is we want to convey,” Mascorella said. “We can feel it and get lost in it, but to know that other people can feel that too – that just makes me want to cry, because that’s all this is about.”
Winner by a mile
In the five years The Post has ranked bands most deserving of more mainstream recognition, Matson Jones, ages 23-28, is by far the youngest of the winning bands. It also won by the largest points margin. Clearly this is a band local music experts believe won’t remain under-recognized for long.
“It’s hard for us to believe when we think about all the incredible, amazing and varied talent in this state right now,” Harada said. “It’s such a compliment.”
It’s also shocking and heartening that in an industry that often only rewards genre-fitting copycats, Colorado has produced a band that looks and sounds like none before. And people are taking notice.
Perhaps the only way these stars could have aligned is for a band to have come together like a supercollider, with their myriad influences swirling like so many electrons. A band that started playing with no greater expectation than to have fun, and with no real stomach for wider fame. When told last year’s winner, Dressy Bessy, had appeared on “Last Call With Carson Daly,” Mascorella said, “The thought of that scares me to death.”
This is a band from different pasts and different paths, all leading to Colorado State University. Grbac, a cellist since middle school, loves Vivaldi and Nirvana. Mascorella was a pianist who brought her passion for the Cure and Joy Division, as well as experience “in a computery dark rock band.” Regan played in a Jamaican ska band and Harada, the drummer with hands that blur, played in surf and punk outfits.
“Ross and I have punk roots, Martina brings that sort of Seattle grungy feel to it, and Anna brings in a bit of the darker, dancier, Depeche Mode stuff,” Regan said.
“And Echo & the Bunnymen – for the drama!” Mascorella added with a laugh.
But what has made Matson Jones stand out most is that it has two frontwomen who dared not to stand at all.
Why the cello? Why not the cello? Mascorella asks.
“If you listen to a lot of Pixies or Breeders, then you are going to write music somewhere along those lines,” Mascorella said. “Martina has played the cello since middle school, so if you want to start a band, why wouldn’t you play the instrument you most want to play?”
It starts with the cello
Grbac, who is on a six-week visit to her Croatian birthplace, met Mascorella five years ago when they were teenagers at CSU. Grbac persuaded her to take up the cello, an instrument she abandoned years before. Soon these prodigies were making a name for themselves as a duo. And what a name: Matson Jones comes from the 20th-century painters Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, who went by the pseudonym “Matson-Jones” when they did window dressings together.
“When Martina played in orchestras, she loved the thickness of the sound and the low tonality that the cello can create,” Regan said. “So to have the opportunity to put all these creative ideas she was coming up with into the cello instead of the guitar, as it related to the rock music she had been listening to for so long, was really exciting for her.”
After adding drums and bass, Matson Jones produced a self-titled and self-released debut CD that eventually attracted a national distributor, Sympathy for the Record Industry. For Sympathy head Long Gone John, and just about anyone who meets Matson, the buzz, at first, is in those bows.
“Martina and I both play guitar, but there is something different about setting these songs to cello,” Mascorella said. “There is something in just pushing and pulling that bow. There is such a sensitivity to the stringed instruments that is just not transferable to guitar.”
The cello is just one component of Matson Jones’ ferocious energy. Its first 10 songs, drawn mostly from Grbac’s teenage journals, include the signature tune, “A Little Bit of Arson Never Hurt Anyone,” and the lyrics, “I’ve got … places that I need to burn down, and people that I need to burn out of my head.” And Mascorella’s “Italian Song” includes the warning, “Give me the sky. Give me the sun. Give me the moon. Give me the stars. If not, I’ll break your legs. If you say no, you won’t see tomorrow.”
Those words can make women emboldened and men, well, nervous. They make Mascorella giggle. “Let’s just say there is a lot of sarcasm in my lyrics,” she said.
If anything bothers the Matson women, she adds, it’s that “the boys” often don’t get enough credit. Certainly anyone who has witnessed the sound of Harada’s fury would agree.
“My preference used to be far more technical drumming,” Harada said, “until I realized all my favorite songs have had simple drum patterns that really fit the song. So especially for our first 10 songs, I set out to write simple drumbeats.”
“A one-in-a-million thing”
Simplicity gave Harada freedom to flail. “For the first six months, I knew it wasn’t a good show if I wasn’t bleeding from more than one place,” he said.
Another unmistakable element of Matson’s appeal is its style. The women dress up, the boys usually wear a coat and tie. “I always thought that we should dress up,” Harada said. “After all, we’re performing.”
A key part of that style is Grbac’s big, bouffant hair, which some claim is a separately living organism, while others assume is a wig. Oh, it’s real, Harada insists. And it’s always big.
“I’ve seen her with her hair down in the morning, and it looks like if you took a cat and dunked it in water,” he joked.
Matson plans to release a new four-song EP in October that will be expanded to a full- length album by winter. Because its deal with Sympathy was a one-time thing, the band likely will again have to release both records themselves.
But if the second effort matches the first, Matson will seem poised for the big time and – gasp – perhaps even an invite from Carson Daly. Harada insists the band will continue to exist only as long as the love does. That’s because the band treats its very existence with the same respect as an affair.
“I honestly feel like this group, and how we came together, is a one-in-a-million thing,” Harada said. “We met, and we fell in love. Everything clicked.”
It clicked enough that they shared a house in Fort Collins the past year while the women worked on their degrees.
“All our friends were saying, don’t live together, it’s a death sentence for the band,” Mascorella said. “But what keeps us together is in thinking of us as a couple in a relationship. We fight, but what keeps us together is that the sex is in the music. We always get back together for that.”
And the idea of becoming rock stars?
“That makes me cringe,” Mascorella said. With a giggle.
“That is not to say that we don’t value success and playing great music and enjoying people’s response to it,” Harada said. “But being a rock star sounds like a really awful way to live.”
Staff writer John Moore can be reached at 303-820-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
