The Daily Spin II

Matt Duncan | Beacon

Welcome back to the Daily Spin. For the uninitiated, this is the series in which I review an album every day of 2025.

As was the case two years ago, my favorite song from each album can be found at the playlist linked here.

Album: Beacon (2010)

Artist: Matt Duncan

Link:

There’s little here that I didn’t already cover in my review of Soft Times, but it’s still intriguing to revisit Matt Duncan’s work - if anything, it confirms something I’ve always suspected - the formula was a little cleaner the first time around.

One of the finest examples of soft rock in recent memory, each track layers itself so beautifully. This has always been a strength of Duncan’s - hell, look at ‘Voices’, the opening twenty-four second prelude to the album, comprised of an assortment of vocal tracks essentially synthesizing a warmup. Throughout the record, these layers appear and vanish at will - despite this being only nineteen minutes long, there’s such a grand amount of sound packed in here that it’s hardly believable - execution at its very best.

Of course, this doesn’t quite always work - some of these songs are a little unwieldy and awkward to dance around, but the general gist of it is so very pleasant that it’s hard to denigrate too significantly.

Rating: 9/10

Best Tracks: I Want the Night to Stay; Beacon

Worst Tracks: 1000 Boys