Scott Matthews
Home Part 1

LA RECENSIONE

Is life stressing you out? Is the work situation becoming more and more unbearable? Is your family getting on your nerves? Study? What a drag! Do you not care about listening in December 2015 to an album that came out after the summer of 2014? A bit of tranquility and inner peace might be worth an hour of your life dedicated to the latest work of Scott Matthews, an almost forty-year-old Englishman from Wolverhampton?

For me, there are no doubts: "Home Part 1" (could that "Part 1" imply a possible "Part 2" in the future? We hope so) is a little folk gem that I morbidly keep in my corner of daily paradise. Scott reworks the feelings of "What The Night Delivers" from 2011, amplifying and softening them to the nth degree, succeeding in the difficult task of not trivializing sonically simple and linear songs. Sweetness and serenity burst from every single note, one sails in a sea of delight. The guitar arpeggios are abundant, they entwine with the strings, they tie and untie with the harmonica or simple piano touches. His voice is honey that glides over hints of electric guitar, shards of brass, gentle drum beats.

Melancholic, dreamy, suspended, virtuous, or tearful: you choose, after the first listen, the adjective that comes closest. For the more demanding, the ghost of Jeff Buckley's voice that hovered here and there in the penultimate album is also dispelled (not that his presence was bothersome, but it risked relegating Scott to the category of "already heard").

A great album, a great songwriter. Deserving. Nothing more.