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The mystery has been solved, sort of. The Short Wave Mystery is Matthew Dinaro, a graduate of UMass Amherst who compiled four years of personal recording to make the “…Solved?” album. With songs like “Hole in My Heart,” “You’re Going to Die,” and “Living is Worse Than Death,” there’s nothing particularly cheery about this project, and while there’s a clear folksy, singer-songwriter vibe to the record, you could throw adjective at it all day with none of them really sticking. It’s Dinaro’s brilliant, albeit jarring lyricism that makes “…Solved?” such a gem. Dinaro’s work has not been widely circulated, and admittedly, the tape as a whole still has a few rough edges—Dinaro admits most of the album was taken straight from demos—but in time, the imperfectness of the recordings simply becomes part of the tape’s flavor.
