akaKatboy's "Arga Warga"

Five vignettes:

1) Late 2002. It's Tuesday night at the Wreck Room, the night we put the Fort Worth Weekly to bed. I'm sitting at the bar with my editor when the members of Goodwin -- a sterling pop-rock outfit I'd previously heard on an EP their singer handed me one night at the Black Dog Tavern, but didn't yet recognize on sight -- started setting up on the stage. They had random numerals affixed to their T-shirts, instruments, and amps. I still recall my precise words to my editor before they started: "Who are these fucking guys with numbers on their shirts?" Forty-five minutes later, they were my favorite band. Matt Hembree was their bass player.

2) Around the same time, I'm interviewing Bill Pohl and Kurt Rongey of The Underground Railroad -- Fort Worth's answer to Gabriel-era Genesis with Holdsworthian guitar, whose musical rigor cured at least one accomplished muso of playing original music for life -- at Four Star Coffee Bar on West 7th. Both of them are very effusive in their praise of Hembree, who played bass on both of their CDs (Through and Through and The Origin of Consciousness), focusing especially on his penchant for melodic invention. I'm inclined to agree. I know a lot of good bass players in Fort Worth, but only Hembree's lines serve as hooks for some of my favorite songs.

3) October 15, 2003 -- the night I met my wife at the Black Dog, watching Goodwin play an acoustic set for KTCU-FM's "The Good Show." Hembree learned all the songs on guitar in the alley right before they hit.

4) Early 2006, when Marcus Lawyer released Top Secret...Shhh, a collection of studio jams by an array of Fort Worth musicians. On the last track, "Ne Exite'," Hembree plays more notes than all the other bass players on the record put together -- and still sounds tasteful. (When Marcus decamps for Austin, Hembree replaces him in Pablo and the Hemphill 7, a band with enough local notoriety to headline the well-attended Fridays on the Green following a lengthy pandemic hiatus.)

5) April 2006. The first time "proto punk repertory band" Stoogeaphilia played a show, I got to see Hembree take off his shirt, get on the floor, bang his head, and lots of other stuff I'd never have expected from his "science officer" persona. (Although once I showed up early for band practice and found him in his truck, reading a sci-fi paperback.) I enjoyed standing onstage next to him for a dozen years (half of them intermittent) of noisy abandon and feedback transcendence before we finally folded the tent.

In 2013, Hembree started his family and began backing away from the band wars, but he never stopped playing music. During the pandemic, he started sending me snippets he'd recorded in his home office late at night, when everyone else was asleep. He'd been a songwriter for Kids Who Care and Bindle (the latter of which I wrote extensively about when I still had the motivation to do so), and now he took the opportunity to document some of his compositions. 

This year, Hembree's best pal, Goodwin mastermind Daniel Gomez, challenged him to record a song a month. They were a mixed bag, ranging from reggae a la Pablo to the beginnings of a full-blown classical piece. Hembree just released his first EP, Arga Warga, to all the streaming services, collecting the rawkin'-est items from his story-so-far. For a happy domestic dad, he's clearly been storing up rage and frustration, and it all comes tumbling out in "Bomb," "Tornado," and "Drowning" -- short, sharp shocks of fiery, feral fury. "Gumshoe" is a catchy power pop change of pace to close things out and send you back to the beginning. Believe me: if I didn't know the guy, I'd still be plopping down my Bandcamp bucks.