According to Kranky, Boduf Songs' Mat Sweet is a musical fringe-dweller, a genuine outsider who participates in no "scene" and generally eschews the music business' promotional apparatus. Given the underground's long and relatively successful tradition of home-taping, self-releasing, and other sideways strategies for fanbase- and community-building, that's easily debated. You don't need to maintain a MySpace page (Boduf Songs doesn't) or do something like shake tambourines with Devendra and Joanna for an Arthur spread to participate in a larger cultural movement. In fact, the recipe that's nourished this one-man project over three LPs and several shorter recordings-- psych-tinged acoustic ramblings, spackle-thick atmosphere, and morbid lyrical preoccupations-- will be familiar to anyone who's spent time with the more apocalyptic segment of the robust indie-folk scene (see: Ben Chasny, David Thomas Broughton, and stylistic godfather David Tibet). Which is to say, a Boduf Songs record can be challenging, but is usually worth the effort.
Ironically, it's in support of his most accessible record to date, How Shadows Chase the Balance, that Sweet's work is being promoted as a sub-basement to the underground. Where previous long-player Lion Devours the Sun often winged off (successfully) on found-sound and noise tangents, Shadows hews to popular song conventions; a couple of tracks even tender soft, shuffling percussion. Most are unhurried affairs that seep in like warm bathwater on streams of static, droned feedback, electronic pulses and field recordings, fluttering and throbbing acoustic strings, and Sweet's own grave murmur. But if songs like "Mission Creep" and "I Can't See a Thing in Here" develop incrementally, once they get where they're going, they're effective and affecting, with sticky-sweet melodies and compelling textures.
This album's approachability, in fact, seems to come from Sweet's truce with sonic beauty. Boduf Songs provided glimpses of pretty in the past, but they were ephemeral as jellyfish, and just as menacing. Shadows' banjo-festooned tracks "Things Not to Be Done on the Sabbath" and "Last Glimmer on a Hill at Dusk", however, are night-blooming flowers that retain their glory past sunrise. The latter, with its swaying valedictory close, could slip unobtrusively onto a Sufjan Stevens tracklist-- as long as you disregard Sweet's Manichean outlook, that is. In Boduf Songs' brutal theology, darkness devours light, death defeats the living and nature and culture are at perpetual fisticuffs. The lyrical idiom is correspondingly pitiless: "We fell to earth from pitch-black skies/ we feed upon the left behind" ("Things Not to Be Done on the Sabbath"), "We come to pick your bones/ Out of its eyes and through your skull" ("I Can't See a Thing in Here"), or "Lay down in the lamplight... tucked in on a bed of nails" ("Last Glimmer on a Hill at Dusk"). Perhaps the guy brings his day job at a Southampton university library home with him, because Boduf Songs is undoubtedly a textually dense, heavy tome to lift. That said, the music never becomes inpenetrable, offputting or "interesting" but, alas, unlistenable. If it seems a strange critical tack to praise an independent musician by downplaying his underground credentials or off-road tendencies, it's only because I think music fans who might otherwise be put off by indier-than-thou rhetoric would actually really dig Boduf Songs.
