The Tallest Man On Earth 'There's No Leaving Now'. 4/10. Originally published here.
Kristian Matsson seems permanently abstracted; he only ever sings about emotional transformation, nature and dreams. We’ve been led to believe that he’s some sort of puissant, raw and thrilling Dylan-esque troubadour, evoking bucolic, emblematic imagery and intrinsic, indecipherable obscurity. But on this, his third album, he’s taken it too far: there’s too much imagery, and too many murky metaphors. Melancholic, moody and so, so goddamn serious, 'There’s No Leaving Now' in fact resonates like the stark antithesis to Jeffrey Lewis’ wry, comical anti-folk. It’s dreary as hell.
Last full-length 'The Wild Hunt' was an exhilarating, near-faultless work of its genre, all frenetic thrumming, threadbare song structures, and pastoral tales of love, loss and longing. But this album doesn’t even tread water: it regresses. There’s little variation and few chords truly register. What exactly does he mean when he flamboyantly intones “with a rain to help river but a river is so hard to please” in the chorus of opener ‘To Just Grow Away’? Verdant country and western twangs backdrop aside, it’s too obtusely ostentatious and metaphorical as an introduction.
Unfortunately, the record progresses in similar fashion – the periodic ‘Revelation Blues’ features pleasant enough guitar ambles and ‘Lead Me Now’, nimble, deft guitar rhythms, but lyrically, it’s all so tedious. The semi-discordant Jeff Mangum croons and high-pitched, sliding guitar riffs on single ‘1904’ add a bit of spice when he hollers “here is something so strange”, but he follows it up in the relatively soft-spoken ‘Bright Lanterns’ with a brazenly wistful “damn you always treat me like a mountain stranger”. Lines like these, corroborated by antiquated lap steel guitar twangs, really do rile.
There’s one bona fide highlight here – title track ‘There’s No leaving Now’. It’s a slight deviation, with Matsson on grand piano: a crushing, heart-rending ballad with bass and drums whose delicate, closing diminuendo muscularly tugs at our heartstrings. It’s unseemly; for on the most part of this long-player, Matsson has simply regurgitated pre-used melodies and chord thrums into different, somewhat lacklustre shapes. On his earlier work, Matsson stuck to a few, radiant formulae. Here, he only stuck to one.
Splassh 'Need It'. 9/10. Originally published here.
Splashh's ‘Need It’ irrefutably hits some blissful, sweltering spot. A three-minute tidal wave of sun-kissed jubilation brimming with towering synths, propulsive tom-toms and cascading riffage, these precocious Hackney boys, the Luv Luv Luv imprint’s latest signees, have created a fuzzy strain of surf-rock which recalls the Brian Jonestown Massacre at their most accessible. It's overwhelmingly brilliant.
Accompanied by a dazzling, fiery video, which features an air-punching pardy atmosphere and the band cruising around flailing crimson beacons and roaming the seemingly terrified streets, it’s a bold and wraithlike inauguration for sure. Formed in only February this year, and painfully youthful, Toto Vivian and Sasha Carlson’s grunge-poppy Splashh are surely one of 2013’s greatest hopes.
