Directed by Chelsea Christer
Featuring The Matches
Running Time: 1 hour and 30 minutes
Currently playing at Slamdance Film Festiva

by Ian Hrabe, Staff Writer

Despite their music being 100% in my wheelhouse, and as someone who lived and breathed pop punk from 2000-2004, I had somehow never heard of The Matches. And I suppose that is the whole point of the documentary. This is the story of a band that built a fanbase from the ground up, wrote songs with tremendous hooks, and were in the right place at the right time to blow up, and yet...it just never happened. Chelsea Christer’s documentary attempts to figure out why it never happened for The Matches, and the result is a bittersweet--but mostly sweet--tribute to these guys who made all the right moves and couldn’t break through the way they wanted to.

Everyone has that one band that they carry around with them everywhere they go (mine is The Weakerthans). The band whose entire discography you know front to back. The band you’ve seen more times than you have digits to count on. The band who, when you find out someone else is a fan, you spend 20 minutes obsessively talking about. The band you’ve considered getting a tattoo in honor of. Fittingly enough, Bleeding Audio opens with footage of fans getting Matches tattoos and talking about what the band means to them. Before even hearing a note of the band’s music, I got it. This is one of those bands who, though they didn’t make it big, changed enough people’s lives.

What’s so refreshing about Bleeding Audio is that it eschews the “Behind the Music” treatment. There’s no sex and drugs, just rock and roll. There’s no infighting or nasty breakup, just four dudes who genuinely seem to love each other, united towards a common goal. These are guys who so genuinely believe in the power music has to build a community. The worst thing that happens is that their manager is controlling and inexplicably neglects to register their songs with BMI, robbing them of years of royalties. Otherwise this is wholesome as hell. 

There are certainly more compelling subjects for a rock doc, so chronicling a Bay Area pop-punk band made up of average white dudes is a surprisingly tricky feat. The reason Bleeding Audio succeeds is due to Chelsea Christer’s ability to lock in on both the band’s passion, and the passion their fans feel toward them. If a documentary filmmaker can capture a subject’s passion, 90% of the battle is already won because passion is infectious. The film also serves as a neat little time capsule to those halcyon days of the mid-00s. In fact, the film was primarily shot between 2014 and 2016 and while I am not sure why it has been on ice for five years, it’s weirdly refreshing to watch a documentary set in a world untouched by *gestures wildly* all of this. It’s also a great excuse to pull up the Matches brief discography on Spotify. Not only is their music full of ear-wormy delights, but they finally have all of their songs registered with BMI so every play earns them fractions of fractions of pennies. It’s a pittance, especially after watching a movie about how hard these guys worked only to get chewed up and spit out by the music industry, but at least it’s something. And besides they’ll always have a legion of fans with their words tattooed on their bodies forever, and that’s the sort of devotion record labels only wish they could buy.