Plastic Anniversary

Plastic Anniversary is both relevant to its time and another well-conceived, thought-provoking chapter in their long-running career.

Plastic Anniversary is yet another masterwork by a duo that have been on the top of their game for longer than some producers have been alive, and long may their reign over sample-driven electronica continue.

Plastic Anniversary, like many of Matmos' best releases, almost feels like an audio essay of sorts. It has a point to make, and it makes it well, and sounds consistently intriguing and oddly catchy throughout. And kudos to them for tackling a heavy topic that seems inescapable in 2019, and making it fresh, fun, original, and with the duo's complete artistic intention made very clear.

Plastic Anniversary is unfamiliar, strange, unsettling, and wonderful.

It’s hard to overstate just how much fun this record is, how playful its complex rhythms are, how brightly colored its tonal variations. Plastic can be a lot of things, but here it is an utter joy.

Plastic Anniversary showcases how it is possible for an artist to find inspiration even in the most mundane. And from those everyday, ordinary (and some not so ordinary) sources, they can elevate their artistic intentions to a higher level.

Plastic Anniversary is flexible, addictive and, ultimately, deeply disturbing. [May 2019, p.115]

It is a record at once dark and joyous, fun and foreboding, gleeful and eerily apocalyptic. Curiously, it may also be the group’s most ‘organic’ record to date, an album whose every beat and every blip seems to question our sense of the real and the fake, the human and the alien.

On Plastic Anniversary, Matmos make a perfectly indestructible album from pure indestructible chaos.

There’s always a risk that an album like this one will be received as novelty music, but the compositional integrity is there, and the music is engaging purely on the level of sound.

Plastic Anniversary is just extraordinarily clever, something to be marveled at more than moved by.

Like other Matmos albums, it relies too heavily on the concept behind the album for merit. Plastic Anniversary is an impressive experiment with intriguing results; it's not, however, an album you'll likely find yourself revisiting time and time again.

It hard not to be engaged by the restless, cerebral daftness--footnotes notwithstanding. [Apr 2019, p.95]

The premise may sound gimmicky and cerebral but the results are mostly playful, poppy and accessible. [Apr 2019, p.32]