Matt Elliott
Howling Songs

"Howling Songs" (in the opinion of the writer one of the most intense and significant albums of 2008) splendidly concludes a trilogy of works inaugurated with "Drinking Songs" and continued with "Failing Songs", both decidedly valid episodes.

The solo career of the former member of Third Eye Foundation is now a mature and rich path of awareness: having abandoned the electronic/avant-noise guise with which the artist had gained visibility in the latter part of the nineties, the solo Matt Elliott dons the dark colors of a harsh, smoky and mournful songwriting, which draws origins from the most committed Cohen to arrive at the rough and cacophonous sounds of the third millennium.

Elliott's lyrical and sonic research is undoubtedly to be counted among the most interesting streams of contemporary songwriting: a mirror of a stray and disillusioned youth (desperate, we might add), his music reflects the confusion and disorientation in front of the mad and unsettling epoch we are living through.

The apocalyptic songwriting of our Hero oscillates with casual and agonizing mutability between arpeggios filled with a Spanish-like melancholy (a melancholy born obviously from the restless wandering of the artist, originally from Bristol, then "escaping" to France, and finally settling in Spain, welcomed as his new homeland) and jarring explosions of an electricity indebted to today's post-rock, particularly that sponsored by artists of the Constellation label (Silver Mt. Zion first and foremost).

The gruff and rasping voice, horribly low and desolate, akin to that of a Mark Lanegan beaten and deprived of his indispensable cigarettes, dissolves in a sonic context that vaguely recalls the visionary folk of Nick Cave of the nineties, even though in truth Elliott's identity is solid and well-defined, although the result of a paradox: his music is indeed dense with a strong awareness of the expressive means available and a vehicle of a clear and irreverent lyrical message, but the impression one gets from listening to these nine exhausting ballads is that of a castaway and drifting Elliott without aim in an infinite sea, in a starless night that is post-modernity, unattainable, confused, irreparably in decay.

Everything is falling apart, every hope is lost, the only way out is the desperate escape into one's own mind. Elliott's metaphysical drifting raft seems to undergo the uncontrollable changes of an unpredictable and suddenly murderous meteorology. The sea is a flat expanse, and Elliott's music is a Mediterranean folk warmed by elegant string arrangements, sweet at times, restless at others; his wheeze is a sigh, a hoarse and ghostly lament that gets lost, free and uncontrolled, in the void of the desolation of a vast and silent ocean. The sea becomes threatening and then stormy, and here comes the transformation of Elliott's folk from acoustic to electric, turning suddenly into a guitar sarabande with a lopsided and "carousel-like" step, like the cold wind that lashes against the face and limbs, like the icy waves that dislodge the planks of his vessel. At the same speed with which it had arisen, the storm returns to mitigate in a bloated and diseased sea, and here Elliott's music once again becomes the fragile and precarious songs of an author and castaway afloat, clinging exhaustively to the few pieces of wood left around him.

The Howling Songs are undoubtedly the logical and physiological continuation of the discourse initiated with the two albums that preceded them: the sense of emptiness remains, but where there was abandonment to an inevitable condition of defeat that precluded any possible strategy of escape, now prevails the impetus, the uncontrollable outburst of an outcast humanity, of a repressed vitality that calls for full expression.

Paradigmatic the eleven minutes of "The Kubler-Ross Model", a shocking opening track that rightfully enters the ranks of the highest and noblest contemporary songwriting: as suggested by the title (which directly recalls the analytical tool developed by Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler Ross to explain the mental dynamics of a patient diagnosed with a terminal illness), the track retraces, through its sudden mood changes, the five stages outlined by the model itself (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance), a bitter and disenchanted metaphor of an individual and social syndrome that infects an entire generation (ours) navigating blindly in a complex society that gives no certainties, nor returns the possibility of constructing a life plan; a generation that suffers (first unconsciously, then with greater awareness) the end of illusions, the end of hope; a hope that finally transforms into lucid sarcasm and disenchanted irony; an irony not devoid of deep existential lacerations.

The ballads that follow are no more than the appendix of a monumental track that gobbles up despair to transform it into chilling acceptance of the existing. But what could possibly follow except bitterness, resignation, a vitality from which the wings have been clipped? Elliott's view of things is raw, his way of proceeding is ramshackle, his singing seems to want to soar into the air only to be crushed in the conviction that what remains is to wearily carry on with one's existence day by day, coldly detaching from the vital urges in anticipation of a tragic and terrible epilogue. An intellectual escape that proceeds now in the guise of a hypnotic acoustic ballad, now with vigorous noisy crescendos, of which the title track is the perfect synthesis, a painful and spectacular song of the End: an End tinged with booming electricity and clumsy choirs of grim wandering cowboy monks in the desert dust.

Nomadic and howling, Matt Elliott thus outlines the contours of a process of degeneration, mental and physical, that our humanity is experiencing. It is worthwhile to carve out some time and carefully listen to the voice of one of the most lucid and penetrating artists of our days. Who knows, maybe our already widely sad de-vision of reality will derive some comfort from it...