The music of Kristian Matsson (who records as the Tallest Man on Earth) doesn't carry the same loneliness of other heartbroken folkies; Matsson's music, instead, has solitude. Loneliness is a condition, a place you end up and from which you are eager to leave, but solitude is a choice. Like Henry James or Emily Dickinson, who best detail the workings of their mind when they are cloistered away from the world, Matsson is more concerned with a wellspring of autonomous thought rather than the chirpings of modern society. His voice and his guitar jig around some distant forest maypole, out of touch and out of sync with everything 21st-century. Instead, he's loosely moored to his dreams, his wanderlust, and all the other broad stuff of poetry that glows brightest in total seclusion.
It used to be easy to hear this solitude in Matsson's music. His first few albums featured only his rich, bleating voice and his acoustic guitar, and listening to his early records can feel like hearing someone rediscover the unfettered joy of playing music in real time. Naturally, for the last few albums, Matsson has been adding tiny layers of instrumentation behind him and the fire of his early days has dwindled into the mist of the songs' arrangements. Dark Bird Is Home, his first album since 2012's There's No Leaving Now, continues in this vein, and Matsson's persona fades even more into the tapestry he's made with his music.
Matsson handles most of the performances, including keyboards and drums. He has some extra players—most notably background vocals and strings from Bon Iver's Mike Noyce—to fill the songs out, but the majority of the starry musical textures are Matsson's. He recorded the album in odd places in his native Sweden and surrounding countries, and the dusting of synths, pedal steel, french horns and trumpets on the album say a lot by saying very little. "Timothy" turns on a winsome clarinet figure played by Matsson, and it's the perfect amount of simplicity to ornament his songs without upsetting the whole equation. Matsson still hasn't "gone electric," and blessedly still avoids the MOR folk-rock tropes of stomping and big-ticket whoa-oh'ing. Behind all the arrangements, front and center on every track, is still his voice.
That voice undersells nothing: There are no wanly delivered lines, no flat and dour stretches of singing. His voice is prismatic, used like an old-guard storyteller who hews his words to any kind of feeling he wants. He does bittersweet reassurance on the stunning title track, and the way he tip-toes down the phrase "Still we're in the light of day" is hypnotic. He does sockless campfire guy on "Beginners", a song so whimsical it could land a three-movie deal with Disney. He even does the soft-rocking-through-the-sadness on "Sagres", where whispers for the audience to "come on" at the end of the chorus feel like the coyest Bruce Springsteen impression in history. Words come out of his mouth brimming with so much emotion, they land just shy of over-singing.
Matsson has always been a little obtuse with his lyrics, and that can be charming or intriguing: The ballad "Little Nowhere Towns" is Matsson half-drunkenly retelling a tale of heartbreak, languishing in the imagery, nearly impossible to pin down. There's some bitterness about his own songwriting, perhaps: "And I'm racing through my pockets now/ 'Cause I'm starting to believe/ Selling emptiness to strangers/ A little bit warmer than my dreams."
Elsewhere he's more inscrutable. The chorus of "Singers" goes "But we're only gone like singers are till springtime/ Let them out, if they should let them out," which never opens up on repeated listens to reveal more than a tangle of words. The big choruses feel undercut by the sometimes-tangled poetry of the words, which get lost in metaphor en route to making their point. On "Sagres", he cuts through all the artifice with a striking moment: "It's just all this fucking doubt," he sings, barely squeezing out the line. It feels like everything he's been trying and failing to say elsewhere.
Which is why Matsson seems like someone who writes songs for himself alone. There's plenty of second-person on the record—a "you" who he walked some trails with, a "you" he's letting go of—but these are songs too caustic and bittersweet to be odes. If his last record was about putting down roots, here he's picking them back up again. It is his most personal record, but not because it's bare and raw, but because it's surreal and dreamlike. He flits between our reality and his own, a world of only dreamers and travelers, flickering lights of towns, shadows and ghosts, birds and trees. It's his way finding joy in his solitude.
