Matt Elliott is not a happy man. During the course of six acoustic songs, he plucks and strums his guitar and growls and groans his way through his despair and despondency and drags the listener down into his emotional trough. Starting with the eleven-minute 'Oh, How We Fell', Elliott brings flamenco style playing down to a funeral crawl and turns it into a lugubrious dirge that takes on such a mournful tone that it feels like an eternity in purgatory.
'This is how it feels to be alone', he drones against a backdrop of ghostly backing vocals on 'Dust Flesh and Bones', which plods for almost ten minutes. You can almost picture him in a half-ruined mansion in the middle of a bleak, desolate moor on a cold, dark night, sitting alone with only his darkest thoughts and unhappiest memories of a painful past for company. He's dishevelled, his clothes faded and worn as he remains for hours, days, weeks, immobile amidst broken furniture festooned in cobwebs and dust, the fire and candles having long burned out as he stares, ruined, at his hands, bloodied and bruised. Oh, he knows pain. It's his only friend.
On the album's centrepiece, the longest song - which also bears the longest title (and suggests that Matt's not completely humourless, even if the laughs are as black as coal) - 'If Anyone Tells Me "It's Better to Have Loved and Lost Than Never to Have Loved at All" I Will Stab Them in the Face', a rolling piano echoes in an empty room with only dead souls looking on. He drags this exercise in emotional agony on for over thirteen minutes,after which time I'm pretty much ready to hang myself, but find myself also thoroughly impressed by his unstinting commitment to bleakness: if ever an artist has made wallowing an art form, it has to be Matt Elliott. The thing is, he does it so beautifully, so elegantly, so theatrically, it's hard not to appreciate his skill. You wouldn't want for his suffering to end, for him to cheer up.
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A rising swell of extraneous noise and feedback slowly builds and eventually swallows up Matt's delicate guitar work and grumbling baritone during the face of the final track, the optimistic and forward-looking 'The Pain That's Yet to Come'. I sincerely hope there is plenty.
Matt Elliott Online
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