I understand those who walk. Those who walk to confront the pain, without a destination, one step after another. It seems like something out of shitty melodramatic films, but often it really works that way: walk until the anger, the pain, the sadness, the negative thoughts evaporate. When you are in these conditions, doing anything else is impossible, standing still is out of the question, so it's better to walk.

You can walk, or you can listen to “Lion Devours the Sun”; the therapeutic effect is more or less the same: cathartic. The second album by Boduf Songs is perhaps the best, and even if it weren't, it is certainly the most eloquent regarding what Matthew Sweet's creature represents: an arched, deformed arm that with its elbow barely touches (but only by coincidence) the gothic universe, and plunges the fist into the abyss of the most minimalist singer-songwriter genre we can conceive. An expression of feelings that, at least initially, didn't allow for variations beyond those granted by a barely brushed guitar, a whispered voice, and some residual sound forgotten behind the songs or added in post-production. The formula, while not losing the dark and alienating contours of its beginnings, would progressively become contaminated with elements borrowed from the worlds of electronics and rock, but at the time of “Lion Devours the Sun” (the year was 2006), the art of this reclusive figure could be considered “pure”.

The analogy is terrible, but it may be useful: the music of Boduf Songs stands to the empyrean of singer-songwriters as the name of Burzum stands to that of black metal. The more open-minded listeners will notice some similarities: the common artistic vision morbidly devoted to the minimalist verb, the obsessive and compulsive tendency to reiterate themes, the shroud of isolation and suffocating solitude that hangs around the tracks, even though the English singer-songwriter's escape from the world is in many ways an introspective effort antithetical to that accomplished by the Norwegian musician: a sense of inadequacy, celebration of failure, desire for annihilation, in the darkness of the night, in the seclusion of one's home, a (meta)physical place where the ritual is performed (of self-flagellation? of purification?). The recording of these sessions takes place in absolute solitude and with improvised means: a microphone set on the instruments to capture the echo, the vibrations of the sound, even before the mechanics. Not without a certain macabre irony towards everything that lies beyond the four walls. And of course, not sparing oneself.

The images that come to mind are terrifying snapshots, squalid interiors of abandoned houses or asylums, dilapidated structures where the echo of the cries of the mentally ill, the dust, the crawling of repulsive insects scuttling undisturbed within the cracks of the crumbling walls, on floors covered with pebbles reign. Or the simple and ruthless outlines of solitude materialize, grim internal landscapes, architectures of horror made of memories, remorse, and regrets that stagnate and become matter (“I built a house with my mistakes” recites one of the key mottos of this work).

The music: Sweet's ballads are composed of elementary arpeggios, often repeated many times, and for a long time, sometimes even in progressive deceleration (in a world where crescendos are more common), as if to describe a feeling of growing exhaustion, but never slipping into artifice, into ostentation. Circular harmonies emerge from the darkness, only to slowly immerse themselves again, into the darkness or among the thick low fogs of drones and the rustlings of a rudimentary recording. If the more malicious might claim that this is music anyone can play, the apparent simplicity of the proposal actually hides a genuine research effort, where Sweet manages to keep the attention on himself the entire time, meticulously rationing the few resources of his expressive world, working by subtraction, focusing on atmosphere, ultimately imposing on himself self-discipline and a severity that are the essence and reason for being of his stylistic signature.

The initial “Lord of the Flies” well explains the modus operandi with which the entire album develops: the three/four notes of the initial arpeggio repeated frantically are a metaphysical drill aimed at digging into the unconscious (and Leonard Cohen's “Avalanche” knows something about it), but soon the hypnotic swirling of the strings will be animated by sudden openings, additional notes that do not break the flow, but rather add to and enrich the palette of colors (shades between gray and black) available to Sweet, who with his hiss perfectly molds to the evolutions/involutions of his compositions, as if the sighs of that voice and the hand sliding over the guitar strings were one and the same, the same ectoplasm of unease and discomfort.  “Two Across the South,” which is the natural continuation of the previous track, resumes its fatalistic moods, but if possible it does so slightly differently (everything in “Lion Devours the Sun” is “slightly different”): this time it's a massive landslide of notes that retains a sort of majesty in its austerity (nuances that are absurd).

It makes sense that in these cases, with the tracks resembling each other so much, engaging in a track by track is as tedious for the reader as it is for the writer. But how can one not mention the alienating ambient tail of “That Angel was Pretty Lame”?, where distorted frequencies and icy voices that seem to come from a broken radio dissolve outlining end-of-the-world scenarios. Or the funereal “Green Lion Devours the Sun, Blood Descends to Earth”?, slow-folk stubbornly oriented towards its own annihilation, driven by slow beats (a hand tapping on the guitar's soundboard?) and caressed in the finale by the lament of an electric guitar in one of its rare appearances: the peak of Sweet's invention and at the same time the limit beyond which his music could no longer be defined as singer-songwriter. Or, finally, how to remain silent about the second half of the limping “Bell of Harness” (almost ten minutes in total)?, unlocked, after the stumbling beginnings, by the flow of a spiral of notes that ends up contemplating the first mirages of something that is not that black/dark/darkest that was stated until a moment before: the first moments of relaxation, perhaps of hope, and also the last, since in this purgative flow the work sees its farewell.

Walking, as mentioned, like in shitty melodramatic films…or listening to “The Lion Devours the Sun”.

Tracklist and Videos

01   Lord of the Flies (05:27)

02   Two Across the Mouth (04:02)

03   That Angel Was Pretty Lame (06:31)

04   Great Wolf of No Tracks (02:45)

05   Green Lion Devours the Sun, Blood Descends to Earth (06:51)

06   27th Raven's Head (Darkness Showing Through the Head of the Raven) (03:43)

07   Please Ache for Redemptive (05:02)

08   Fall of Cherry Blossom in Long Shadows of Twilight (03:45)

09   Bell for Harness (09:36)

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