San Francisco – It doesn’t seem like The Tallest Man On Earth is planning to settle down anytime soon. The ramblin’ man persona singer-songwriter Kristian Matsson cultivated back in 2008 with his full-length debut Shallow Grave holds just as strongly on his latest effort Dark Bird Is Home. That’s not to say his sound hasn’t matured and expanded over the intervening years and through a few releases since. It has, reaching a creative peak with this one. It feels like a summation, a grand synthesis of all the themes his quavering voice, one that somehow balances that delicate line between defiant strength and aching vulnerability, has tackled over the years.
Said themes are both comfortingly familiar and refreshingly varied: Dark Bird is full of longing and withered dreams, restless hope, existential yearning for inner peace, home, perhaps love but maybe love is too much to ask for. Like any good poetry, you can hear the words and extrapolate one meaning from them, but you also realize that just below the surface is an emotional mystery that can never be fully expressed, a deeper truth only partly understood but intrinsically felt. Indeed, Matsson never reveals everything with his words, and the lyrics on this record are especially nebulous, stocked with images of darkness, shadows, the undying night, obscuring meaning and impeding enlightenment. Sometimes the mood is resilient like the full band grandiosity of “Seventeen”; sometimes he sounds defeated, an isolated wanderer on the gorgeous opener “Fields of Our Home” with its angelic backing vocals and quiet intensity.
It’s hard to pick a favorite from the bunch. No song feels out of place on this lean collection of ten tracks, nor does any song drag on the listener’s attention span. Matsson paces the album wisely with punchy, drum-bolstered tunes like “Darkness of the Dream” propped alongside more subdued slow-burners like the wistful “Beginners.” The eponymous album closer is a definite highlight that perfectly captures the overall tone of the record: melodic yet mournful, haunting yet utterly compelling. He even offers a glimpse of hope as he sings, “this is not the end,” that we can find a way to live “with our ghosts within.”
If I were forced to pick only one, however, I would have to take the sparse “Little Nowhere Towns,” a ghostly rumination on the decaying memory of home. Consisting primarily of just Matsson’s distinctive, wearied voice and what sounds like an antique piano recorded in another epoch, the song is able to rouse an immense amount of emotion using very little besides an affecting melody and chilling lyrics. The little nowhere towns of the title are the forgotten places we all collectively come from, places we hurriedly attempt to escape yet never truly can, always partially chained to the permanency of the past. No matter how far you run, Matsson seems to be suggesting, you always end up with yourself. Despite his rambling ways, perhaps Matsson is starting to come to terms with that fact.
The Tallest Man On Earth will be touring the United States starting this month. (Here’s a Best New Bands review of one of his 2012 concerts.) Dark Bird Is Home is out this week via Dead Oceans.
Nick Schneider
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