Album Review – Matt Carson’s “No Regrets”
If you really want to test your mettle as a country music fan, if you’re one who thinks they can handle songs of heartbreak one after another like shots of Jack lined up across the bar, if you want to put your emotional capacity through the paces and stress test your country music heart to see if you can compete with the big boys of pain tolerance via country tunes, Matt Carson’s No Regrets is the album for you. This is not for the amateur sad song connoisseur out there. Neophytes to this most severe side of country should start first with records that mix a few sad songs in with other stuff to steal them for what they’ll experience here. This thing should come with a warning label for how heart-rending it is.
With the self-expressed mission to “Make Country Music Sad Again,” Matt Carson makes some serious inroads into this stated objective by self-penning incredible tearjerkers that show no compassion in their conveyance of sorrow, and sings the hell out of some well-recognized covers as well. Completely blind from the time he was born, this South Carolina native doesn’t need to embellish his story to make you wholeheartedly believe his songs of loss, leaving, and regret. When Matt Carson croons about missing someone’s touch, and still smelling them in the hall after they’ve left for good, your own sense of smell and feel are heightened to the emotional toll this man has felt.
First learning to play guitar and bass when he was 7-years-old, a young Matt Carson would sit beside the radio on Saturday nights in Charleston requesting one sad country song after another from the local station, so much so that DJs demanded he request a few happy ones before they would honor his suggestions. This undying loyalty to the sad side of country comes through in his original music that is fiercely traditional, and presented in hard honky-tonk and classic Outlaw styles. Slow, painful, merciless, and purposeful, No Regrets can make a grown-ass man’s insides feel like mud in the best of ways. You better find some better excuses than just cutting onions when you have this record on.
But it’s one skill to write a sad song that works in telling a depressing story. It’s another to sing a song with such soul and commitment, the audience is incapable of not believing and feeling every word. Deep battered with soul, but more classically country-sounding than someone like Chris Stapleton, even if you don’t get into the sad state of affairs present in a Matt Carson song, you will be dutifully impressed and moved with the voice that he sings them with.
Carson’s covers of well-recognized country standards like Waylon’s “Just Because You Asked Me To,” or Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through The Night” are rendered original-sounding simply from how well Matt Carson signs them. No Regrets also helps realign what it truly means to sing Outlaw music in country. So often these days, those who want to be considered practitioners of the subgenre focus on self-aggrandizing tough guy songs. Matt Carson reminds us that Waylon Jennings and Kris Kirstofferson made their way through life mostly on half time ballads about heartbreak, not recycled Southern rock guitar riffs played too loud over braggadocios platitudes.
The one concern about No Regrets is it might be too severe for most members of a wide audience. It starts off with four incredible country heartbreak songs that are hard to impossible to find criticism in, but after a while, the ear craves a little reprieve and variety. Luckily he shakes it up after that with “Just Because You Asked Me To,” and the second half of the record does include a bit more diversity to help keep you engaged. Nonetheless, it’s easy to catalog No Regrets as the hardest, slowest, heaviest country music record you will hear all year without veering into the Gothic realm.
And it all has a happy ending of sorts. Matt Carson has moved on from the heartbreak of youth, and is now married with four kids. But that history, and the stories he can compose in his mind without the distraction of the visual world make him a unique and valued songsmith, and one who doesn’t have to pass his works off to some other singer to record the definitive rendition, he can handle that all himself. Too heavy for some, but potent enough to finally break through the high tolerance that other hardcore country music fans have built up over the years, No Regrets is the right type of bad medicine to get your craving for sad country back to satiated.
1 1/2 Guns Up (7.5/10)
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May 13, 2019 @ 8:27 am
yup ..matt’s on track . you hear it AND you feel it .
that’s all a country fan is asking for and what is rarely delivered by mainstream .
May 13, 2019 @ 8:28 am
Awesome review. I’ll have to check him out!!
Also, Trig.. please consider doing an article on Scooter Braun.
Every Television event (Like Dancing with the stars, The Voice, and now next week’s American Idol finale) and every award show (including non country awards like Billboards, Grammys etc) Dan and Shay are featured and perform…. I came to the conclusion it’s due to Scooter Braun, their manager who also manages Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, Demi Lovato, and ironically The Zac Brown Band. Scooter is super powerful in the music industry.. and it frustrates me because Dan and Shay aren’t country… When their recent duets are with Tori Kelly and Kelly Clarkson.. you know they ain’t country.. And I’m worried that Scooter will sign/work with other pop stars and send them to country radio. Mark my words, Dan and Shay will one day collaborate with Ariana Grande and it will be the #1 song on Hot Country charts for over a year. Ariana’s fans are crazy competitive and they will stream it like crazy so Ariana can become the Queen of country music, overthrowing Bebe Rexha..
May 13, 2019 @ 8:31 am
Dan and Shay have risen in popularity this year, leaps and bounds. I think they are the biggest threat to country music at the moment…
May 13, 2019 @ 8:36 am
Inappropriate place for these comments and questions, Hey Arnold. The focus here is Matt Carson. Thank you.
May 13, 2019 @ 8:50 am
You are right. I apologize to Matt. Thanks for reviewing his album. I plan to check it out
May 13, 2019 @ 8:44 am
arianna could sing in a foreign language ( which i’m pretty sure she’s already doing most of the time ) and have a hit on ANY chart . hype is king when you’re working with her gullible fan base ( beyonce , swift etc…. ). her music , while no doubt well-intentioned , is forgettable , often unintelligible and is about the SOUND of her voice and her marketable sex quotient above all else . no ….i’m not saying she isn’t a talented singer ….but she’s no ” Pink” when it comes to great pop material and actually SINGING a song and not moaning , vamping , jamming and writhing to sell it .
here’s a thought : why not throw arianna , bebe , FGL , Antebellum , kane brown …even rhianna , adele , drake and the biebs …..all of ’em …..why not just throw them all on the mainstream country charts and let them sing with the zak browns , the little big towns , the aldeans , the fake owns, chris young etc…and watch it all self -destruct and morph into whatever mutation its already trying to . the sooner the better ……..finicky pop fans can burn out on it all in one place and perhaps we’ll be done with it . The REAL stuff would then sound so good , so fresh , so REAL it may stand a far better chance of resonating .
May 14, 2019 @ 6:13 am
Pink. Lmaooooo
May 13, 2019 @ 8:55 am
I’m just finishing up my first listen of this album, and I think it’s outstanding.
May 13, 2019 @ 9:10 am
That name sounds familiar. Was he on one of the star search shows?
May 13, 2019 @ 9:20 am
This guy has the voice and the sound and the songs. But all hopelessly sad. Reminds me of Rex Hobart and the Misery Boys. Anybody remember them? They recorded on Bloodshot records and every song was a weeper. Tunes like ” I’ll forget her or die tryin” conveyed all the despair and hopelessness of a man doomed to lose. Here’s the problem though, when your performing live it doesn’t hold people’s attention in a bar very well. You gotta have some uptempo for folks to keep them interested. Or you play listening room type gigs where people listen in silence and then clap appreciatively after every song. Curious where this guy can take it. Great sound and great songs though! Good point Trig about Waylon. If you dig into his studio albums, you find one slow weeper after another, you gotta work to find the uptempo stuff.
May 16, 2019 @ 12:35 am
Wow, thanks for naming Rex Hobart; just checked him out – great stuff!!!
May 13, 2019 @ 1:13 pm
Wow, they just keep coming out of the woodwork (for me anyway) in 2019. Another good one! Definitely going to check this out.
May 13, 2019 @ 2:03 pm
I’m glad you reviewed this amazing album.
May 13, 2019 @ 3:50 pm
Whew. This is a mopey album, but I like it.
May 13, 2019 @ 4:46 pm
6 songs in, and he sounds like a keeper. Very soulful His vocal inflections remind me of Jim Lauderdale..Also, it would be awesome, if you could link the artist’s website in your reviews. 🙂
May 13, 2019 @ 7:37 pm
“this most severe side of country”
I don’t know, I can imagine some pretty extreme severity. How’s he compare to Scott H. Biram? or Hank III? Townes? Possum? Guess Ill have to listen.
May 13, 2019 @ 8:25 pm
I would classify these guys on the dark, Gothic side of country, where this is traditional country with depressing themes. Maybe not Townes, but even Townes had a lot of sweet songs in his repertoire.
May 15, 2019 @ 5:57 pm
So more like Moreland with an extra jolt of country-ness, musically?
May 13, 2019 @ 8:01 pm
This is outstanding. Genuine sad songs are what made all the greats what they were. No such thing as too much in my book.
May 13, 2019 @ 9:49 pm
As far as I’m concerned THIS is country music. This is the kind of music that can save country. The really traditional stuff is good but it’s not something that is going to captivate many new listeners, but this is something that could be slipped into a playlist here and there and really tug the heart strings and make a fan. I like my country music sad and slow and this guy is doing it a great justice. When you think back to the Jones, waylon, willie and Coe days you dont think about the fast and loud songs. You remember the heartbreak and the pain and lessons learned that they tore straight to your heart with voices that werent crafted by editing and emotion that would make the strongest men feel it. We need more country like this in the world. The 1st two songs on this album are country at its finest. I would give this an 8.5/10 and that may go up after I spin this a few times with a little bourbon!
May 14, 2019 @ 4:55 am
Good album & good review.
No Regrets is not an overproduced & sugarcoated product of the Nashville-machine.
Nine tracks. The slower songs are the highlights. “Help Me Make It Through The Night” works as part of the album…but as a standalone track it is just another cover version of a great song.
May 14, 2019 @ 6:32 am
Bought it.
Miles Davis once said every good musician has a distinctive ‘cry.’ When this guy’s voice jumps up into a chorus, you can hear it comes from down deep. That’s a beautiful thing. Matt sounds like a genuine fan, too. His Instagram account has some nice clips.
Keeping it real.
May 14, 2019 @ 7:33 am
I like it… but now I’m all sad and shit. I guess the album works. I’ll be buying it.
May 14, 2019 @ 9:38 am
I read nearly all of Trigger’s articles, but the album reviews are the #1 reason I check in. Excellent album! I’ve listened to it a couple times through and it gets better each time. I’m kind of surprised it didn’t score a bit higher
May 14, 2019 @ 1:57 pm
Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ… This guy… Two bars in, and the hair on my neck was standing on end. As always, Trig, thank you for the tireless (often, thankless, outside this site) work you do to bring great Country Music to our attention.
May 14, 2019 @ 4:51 pm
I pre-ordered this album and upon receiving it I was completely blown away.Best of luck to Matt and his family!
May 16, 2019 @ 1:43 pm
I really dug his sound, even if I didn’t quite connect to all his songs. There’s something about the simple aesthetic I loved. If the voice can inflict the pain the way his can, why distract with complex instrumentation? Thanks for turning me onto this.
May 26, 2019 @ 8:02 pm
I finally got around to listening to “No Regrets.”
Growing up, everyone – friends and family – always asked me “how can you listen to those sad song?” I sang, “I’m No Stranger to the Rain” in a middle school talent show. So, I get Carson. I was hoping he was from Kentucky …. sounds at times like Sturgill (makes me pine for a Sturgill album like this sonically).
Very good album!
Thanks, Trig!
May 29, 2019 @ 4:38 pm
I ordered this CD after hearing To You on the SCM playlist and it floors me. I like dark and sad. I cut my teeth on Leonard Cohen in my youth. The aching in his voice is palpable. I am so glad to have been exposed to this.