Nobody else would make a movie with this premise. Nobody else would follow it through to the gaspingly hilarious conclusion it reaches here. Metal Detector Maniac proves once again that there are some benefits to building a body of work in near-total obscurity. Imagine pitching this idea to a studio. Imagine trying to market it to the general public. Think of all the masterpieces we’ve lost because of all that needless bureaucracy.” - Will Sloan

Will Sloan's Brilliant Thoughts

Free from pretension, Farley has become something of a filmmaking genius. He produces work that isn’t trying to be anything grander or more ambitious than he and his friends collaborating on something they love. Now, a devoted audience loves what they do just as much as they love making it; it’s an ideal symbiosis between creator and fan. By writing about Farley, I’m not attempting to push Motern Media into the mainstream. Rather, I only want to shine a spotlight on the profound, inane beauty that can be created in a place as accessible as one’s own backyard.” - Brianna Zigler

Paste Magazine

Heard She Got Married is an exciting indication that Farley/Roxburgh’s distinctive style and working method can be harnessed to evoke different moods and textures. Their movies often feel like the work of kids who went to college but never outgrew making backyard movies with friends, and while Heard She Got Married retains this spirit, it’s also their first movie to feel like the work of middle-aged men. Its melancholy tone, slow-burn suspense plot, chilly mise-en-scène, and comically stylized dialogue/acting combine to create a tone and style that deserves the frequently abused term “Lynchian” — but there’s no one term that quite describes what they’ve come up with here.” - Will Sloan

ScreenSlate

Matt Farley is a personal hero. A musician, he takes the concept of being a prolific creator to an entirely new (and inspiring) level. And he does it from the comfort of his basement” - Thomas Smith

Better Marketing

I’ll close with this: There are tons of people out there who say they’re going to make movies or write books or whatever, and they don’t. Farley is putting his stuff out there and seems to be a good sport about it. I kind of can’t help but respect him.”

Kenneth Lowe and Jim Vorel, Paste

There’s no shortage of quality musical comedy out there, but there’s no one making silly songs quite like Matt Farley, a.k.a. The Toilet Bowl Cleaners. Farley’s written literally tens of thousands of novelty songs over the last eight years or so, putting them up on all the various musical streaming and download services. He publishes under a variety of assumed names, like The Hungry Food Band and The Very Nice Interesting Singer Man. But The Toilet Bowl Cleaners is easily my favorite, with a smiling, unflinching approach to bodily functions and the messes they make. A friend of mine played them for me on a road trip recently, and at first I was extremely put off. But my friend insisted we keep going, and after around 20 songs about farts, diarrhea, and pee, I was dying. The songs are alternately cheerful, angsty, triumphant, and sad, but all are sung with an unflinching earnestness that slowly makes them a true joy to listen to. You can tell Farley has a lot of fun making these songs, and that’s the real pleasure in listening to them. Not every album is great, but some are, especially Never Gonna Flush Again. Here, the artist takes a long look in the bathroom mirror, Windex in hand, and decides never to write poop songs again, no matter how much fans like me clamor for them.”

Gus Spelman, The Onion A/V Club

A man in Massachusetts has written 88 songs about specific New Jersey towns. Actually, 88 epically, purposefully terrible songs about New Jersey towns.  There are hits like 'Woodbridge is a Heck of a Town' or 'Possibly the Best Song About Union City,' and who could forget 'Isn’t Saddle Brook Great? I Think It Is.'What would inspire such a thing? And did he really just try to rhyme 'Carasaljo' in his song about Lakewood?We had questions. Matt Farley of Motern Media had answers.”

Jessica Remo, NJ.com

I’ve been telling anyone who’ll listen in recent weeks that I’ve been obsessed with the impossibly niche world of a backyard filmmaker from New England, but I’ve also been struggling to recommend how they can best join in the fun. Monsters, Marriage, and Murder in Manchvegas & Don’t Let the Riverbeast Yet You! were stand-out titles I could cite as favorites of his backyard horror comedies, but it isn’t until you fully sink into his catalog, taking in years of development over multiple films and sampling dozens of extratextual novelty songs, that the full significance of those crown jewels becomes clear. That’s a lot to ask of someone who’s likely never heard of Matt Farley before, especially in an era where it’s difficult to successfully recommend even a minutes-long YouTube clip. In that way, Local Legends is a godsend. It summarizes everything that is wonderful, daunting, immense, and trivial about Matt Farley as an outsider artist in a single 70min morsel – twenty years of unfathomable dedication to obsessive pet projects made digestible in just over an hour’s time. Miraculously, that infomercial style self-review of Farley’s back catalog also stands as his most substantial, rewarding work to date – a weirdly philosophical meta-commentary on what it looks like to make underseen, underappreciated art in the internet age. We live in a time where it’s more affordable to produce & publish movies & music than it ever has been before, which means that there are so many amateur voices in the game it’s near impossible to get noticed, even for someone as naturally entertaining as Matt Farley. Local Legends captures the essence of Matt Farley & Motern Media, but it also captures the current state of online self-publishing at large and, by extension, what self-funded D.I.Y. art projects look like in the 2010s. If Matt Farley ever 'makes it big,' it will be because of decades of stubborn dedication & repetition, a ton of hard work for potentially very little reward. It almost doesn’t matter whether or not that happens, though, because he’s already delivered his masterpiece in Local Legends, a movie of and about our time in amateur pop culture.”

Brandon Ledet, Swampflix

Matt Farley has produced more near-masterpiece music than most artists have produced music period. That is not even taking into consideration Moes Haven, his collaboration with fellow prolific songwriter Tom Scalzo, or the several feature-length films they have made with Charles Roxburgh.”

Zachary Heltzel, The State Press

The results are something between a giant, online art installation and the first true example of search-engine-optimized music.”

BRENDAN KLINKENBERG, Wired