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The sound of melancholic pain that provides comfort and despair at the same time.
This is the main theme of Matt Elliott's art. The dark piano effusions, the distant and alien voices of ghosts wandering without peace, the motifs of dusty music boxes that continue wearily until they run out, the choir, bewitching in its inevitability, of drunken sailors on a ship lost among the ocean waves... without a destination...
The Central European influences (the acoustic guitar of the concluding "Forty Days") are abundant and often colored by electronic arrangements that are never intrusive aiming always at highlighting the "gently oppressive" atmosphere that permeates the entire record. A defining feature of the work is certainly the restless whispers recorded backwards ("Let Us Break"), which, used with great expressive effectiveness, gracefully rest on the sound carpet.
The sensations conveyed by Elliott's pathos are comparable to those that a worn-out dramatic film soundtrack might communicate, seen through the undefined contours of a dream... a story whose characters lose what gave meaning to their existence... and in the end a mass of inert and listless clouds covers what remains of their weak and worn-out lives...
The music drags faintly, bringing with it a sense of sadness and bewilderment, but almost familiar and reassuring. I can glimpse the echoes of Wyatt (for example, the title track) in the uncertain approach to note modulation... sublime in its innocent melody is also the structure of "Cotard's Syndrome" and suggestive, the peak in my opinion of the entire album, "The Sinking Ship Song", whose title says it all.
It is the ghosts that torment the artist's thoughts that are the protagonists of these watercolors, painted under the grayness of a barren and distant sky.
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