There’s No Leaving Now (Dead Oceans) The Tallest Man on Earth
transcendent despair—also some of the finest we’ve heard from him. Death, heartbreak, and aimlessness are the specters looming within and without this album. Matsson sweats their approach, but often counter-
Kristian Matsson isn’t the understating type. If the pseudonym weren’t evidence enough, consider some of the seriously grave titles like Sometimes The Blues Is Just a Passing Bird or, better yet, Shallow Grave. He wields hyperbole as a painter would
vails the gloom in the same breath. This is particularly true of the deceptively shiny opener, “To Just Grow Away.” “You spend so many nights just gathering stones, silver tears, and old sapphire bones,” is actually a glimmer of hope in the midst of the song’s overwhelming air of perdition. Contending
a set of drama-drenched watercolors, except for
with the morbidity everywhere else is a warm,
Matsson the brush is his expressive rasp.
steady pulse of piano and bass.
That voice reveals the Swedish folkie as more
Matsson is also careful to leave a flicker of hope
of a sculptor though; it’s the steely instrument by
in the darkness of “Bright Lanterns”—invoking
which his Tallest Man records carve their subjects
the title as a savior from “the fires and from the
down to the interior-form waiting beneath the
falling down satellites.” That’s pretty much his
surface. On There’s No Leaving Now, his third full-
deeper contention on this album. It’s eager to find
length, Matsson’s flayed tenor collides with some
light in the pitfalls of humanity, and echoes that
of his most graceful acoustic musings to date. But
untidy process in its unpolished, decidedly mussed
their beauty is skin-deep, and it hides a complex,
production.
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