Matt Elliott
Drinking Songs

I'm in a record store and I don't know what to pick, as usual the printed paper and website suggestions are echoing in my head creating a huge mess... but what do I take... what do I take? Ahhh, a wonderful cover, a recommended record: a sepia-toned picture with a man smoking at a café table, inside a Prague bar, a black cat by his side... fantaisies.
I grab it quickly, I don't know what to expect, but the cover has bewitched me... enthralled, there's something I recognize in it, something I've always recognized in myself... sadness, you might say? Maybe, but not the trope of the cursed poet, huh?

I get home and start listening, I was already as pissed off and depressed as a vanquished louse... two seconds, a background arpeggio, echoes in the distance, voices layering, a cello joins, and the melody begins... so slow, so stretched and delicate... desperate and despairing.
What was in his heart when he recorded this album? Immediately I'm reminded of Elizabeth Anka Vajagic, or the never too praised Mazzy Star, Lisa Germano or....the Third Eye Foundation, which I discover is the original band of this mysterious Matt Elliott.
The most moving track: The Kursk... it starts with battlefield sounds, the agitated voices of soldiers, the digging of tracks, then begins the gentle chord progression, a voice starts, the cello joins, and the voices layer with a sweet and inspired sacred spirit, as if they were the spirits of the soldiers themselves singing, exhaled from the site of the massacre.

It's impossible to detach from the hypnosis of this album, you immerse yourself in the smoke swirls exhaled by the cigarette on the cover... you let yourself be lulled by the circus organs that sneak in here and there, sometimes you seem to hear a Waitsian nursery rhyme; meanwhile, the journey into melancholy continues.
There's also something very political in this album: a soft cry against war in the lyrics and samples that Elliott inserts here and there... a desperate invocation for a world without peace, considering that, according to many historians, the total days without armed conflict since human history began are only 80.
Listen to it absolutely, if you're absinthe fanatics, all the better, I who no longer drink, am content with the album, cheers.