Album Review: Thrive Through Decay

Thrive Through Decay is an album that is poetry over carefully woven instrumentals from songwriter and producer team Richard Matthews and Christa Hopkinson. This sound is a far cry from Richard’s band, so it’s a great introduction into other music that Richard is involved with.

The opening track, In The Sun, is a happy vibe with carefully spoken lyrics about summer, and having more fun. It sounds like a cry hidden beneath something uplifting. From what I have been able to find out about this duo, known as ‘Spoken Opus’, it seems that this album is like a journal entry or even just a story presented as such about the trials and triumphs of life. Because, very suddenly, the next track is called All For Greed. The vibe changes into a more moody piano driven sound. Spoken Opus’s cadence and style are very heavily rooted in Aotearoa Hip Hop, yet the style is certainly focused on the more philosophical East Coast style. The album is full of meditations like this. The lyrics on each track focus in on a feeling, idea or current situation and where Richard speaks his mind through rap and poetry.

Prey is a great track with some obvious nods in my mind to that East Coast style, but also of the rock and metal elements that hip-hop heads like me love. The album moves quickly enough through different soundscapes which I believe is the key to understanding the album. Let the atmosphere guide you through the track, like on Serpents during its chorus. You can hear the rock and metal elements appear in subtle ways; in this track it’s the bass line. It reminded me a lot of early Eminem instruments on this album. Even Marshall Mathers was eventually writing his own instrumentals.

There are times where the delivery of the vocal changes, but overall the sound has a set idea of what it wants from the listener, and that is your attention to the message behind the lyrics of each song. Like the longing sound of the brass in Strike Back sets the mood for the stories. The track Strike Back showcases the sort of music Spoken Opus is. With a full on story about battle and the struggle of it all, the music is powerful and uplifts the story. It also comes in as the longest track on the album.

The last few tracks of the album bring in an electric bass and the album settles into a more band sounding based hip-hop style. Special mention to the lyrical lines on Last One Here, as well as the voicing of the chords.

Overall, Thrive Through Decay is a musical landscape with some great ideas and stories woven into them. I enjoyed walking around the park listening to this and thinking about what Richard is speaking about.