by LORRAINE CARPENTER

Shortly before the holidays, Matt Mays told a Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, newspaper that he was homesick, an “I’ll be home for Christmas” sentiment for his fellow Maritimers. He’d written a song on the subject (“Spoonful of Sugar”), and he’d been living in New York City for several months, sorting out the business of releasing his last album stateside. Prior to that, he was sleeping in his truck outside a Halifax studio, during the debauched creation of his new solo album, When the Angels Make Contact. Thinking back to that bluesand booze-induced haze, shared by producer Tim Jim Baker (the drummer for Mays’s band, El Torpedo), Mays would much rather be in New York.

“I love producing records,” he says, “and there were good vibes in the studio when we started, but then my life sorta got weird. I lost a relationship, and basically my best friend in my life, who was my girlfriend—we lived together. The music just came too much into my life and I lost her, and Tim lost his girlfriend the same way at the same time, so we were basically drunk in the studio, 24 hours a day, just living this record. That’s when I learned my biggest lesson, that the best music comes from life and death. Tim and I had nothing but the record. If we didn’t have it, we would’ve been screwed. Listening to it now, I really meant every note of it. I’m really proud of that record.”

No doubt. With its ambitious mix of raunchy guitars, mammoth melodies, electronic grit, hip hop beats and vocals (care of Buck 65 and DJ Skratch Bastid), bittersweet break-up balladry and solid ambient, funk and talkbox nonsequiturs, the album’s impressive eclecticism and often epic sound are matched by its lyrics, which dwell in the deep end of good and evil, spirituality and the supernatural, and the road.

“I wrote the songs from the perspective of somebody’s journey,” says Mays. “I travel from town to town, always looking from the outside in at people in my own life. All my friends are getting married and having babies and I’m asleep in the back of a shitty van, touring around, just sorta following this light at the end of the tunnel, following my heart with this music thing. So sometimes some questions are posed.”

“One question posed by several of the record’s critics was whether an accompanying feature-length film of the same name had really been shot, then shelved due to dried up funding. Dialogue dots the album, the video for its title track is a montage of clips from what looks like a haunted road movie, and the record’s elaborate packaging is adorned with its production stills. But could it all be a cunning ruse, some mythical spin to give an aura to an already ethereal concept album?

Celluloid Specter

“No, everybody seems to think that,” says Mays, clearly amused by the micro-controversy, “but there is a movie done—or at least shot.”

It may not have an entry on IMDB.com, but the movie was in fact backed by Toronto’s Revolver Films, who’ve produced all of Mays’s videos to date, and helmed by music-video director Drew Lightfoot. It even features Sam Roberts (to whom Mays has often been compared) in a small part as an Australian surfer. Unfortunately, the project went broke at the post-production stage, but Mays isn’t ruling out its completion.

“If the record somehow catches on—maybe the tour will help—then we’ll probably release another single, maybe transfer more footage from the movie, and maybe unveil the whole thing through videos. I don’t know. If not, it may stay dormant for a while, until I can get the funds to finish it.”

They say that time is money, and Mays is short on both. Following his current Canadian tour in support of When the Angels Make Contact, Mays will rejoin El Torpedo to play some American dates in time for the U.S. release of their East Coast Music Awards-sweeping 2005 record, Matt Mays & El Torpedo. The band has plans to record a follow-up too, and Mays is determined to move back to New York, leaving little time to find new backing for the film, let alone supervise the editing and soundtrack work. But maybe, he says, he’ll be bailed out by “a guardian angel, with contacts. Sorry, that was cheesy.”

WITH THE MUSEUM PIECES AT THE CABARET DU MUSÉE JUSTE POUR RIRE TONIGHT, THURSDAY, JAN. 18, 9 P.M., $15.50

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