A week on from listening to Matt Elliott's new album, 'The Broken Man' and I'm still feeling intensely morose. It's no mean feat, and I figured Matt had had the last word in gloom for the year, despite it being but a few days in.
But then I decided to investigate Rella the Woodcutter's 'The Golden Undertow', and discovered he had something to add. 'Dead Star' may be a mere two and a half minutes in duration, but its pallid, spectral tone and Rella's parched voice is enough to sap the very life from you. The shuffling drums and slightly jangling guitars of 'Bonobo' hardly contrive for party music, but in between 'Dead Star' and the monochord drone of 'A Forest Journey' it's a hoot.
Psychedelic guitar noodlings rattling bongos surface on 'Black Universe', but the mood is anything but a technicolour kaleidoscope, and way off in the distance, drowning in an analogue reverb, Rella reaches in vain for a hand to help him out on 'My Ship'. 'Leave Your Home' is magnificently wan, the wavering pipe sound that of a lost soul on a cold mountainside wandering is despair with no place to go.
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There's just something about Rella's delivery that's so fucking heart-rending, so desperate, alienated and maladjusted. 'Can I ask you a favour? / keep you away with distance / I'm afraid of your touch' he sings pleadingly on 'Inside Gratitude'. He sounds so frail, so tormented, and he drags the listener down with him into his scared little world.
The final track, the eight-minute 'Drugtime Family' flexes an entirely different set of muscles as it spins a psychedelic yarn over a thumping drum, a mesmerising trip-out that shimmers with all of the colours of the rainbow and brings solace to the troubled mind at last.
Boring Machines Online
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