Around the time he put out his sparse and arresting second album, 2010's The Wild Hunt, Swedish singer-songwriter Kristian Matsson also released a cover of "Graceland". Matsson's music as the Tallest Man on Earth gives off an uncanny, hard-to-place air, caught between his native surroundings and the American folk he reveres. But to hear him tackle that familiar melody put some of the strange and hard-to-pin-down appeal of his music into focus. Rough, loud, and unabashedly nasal, Matsson's voice sounded like it was stripping off the song's varnish and hewing each line into something jagged enough to impale you in the heart.
The best songs on The Wild Hunt, like the rollicking strum of "King of Spain" and the wistful piano ballad "Kids on the Run", had that same directness of melody and threatened just as many splinters. Like so many folkies before him, Matsson assumed the role of the wandering troubadour ("I live until the call, and I plan to be forgotten when I've gone," he declared with early-Dylan aplomb on the title track), and his songs, in contrast to folk tradition, didn't so much conjure a distinct sense of time or place as they did a general feeling of restlessness and ever-forward movement. Keeping with the music's sage simplicity, the loneliness of the bare, echoing instrumentation felt decidedly practical: How can you assemble a reliable backing band when you're sleeping under a different tree every night?
It's clear from the title of Matsson's latest, There's No Leaving Now, that things are a little different this time around: He's putting down his roots. Recorded mostly at home over a leisurely five-month stretch, Leaving is more diffuse and relaxed than his earlier albums. It's also his first foray into multi-tracking: He's added woodwinds, drums, and additional fingerpicked guitars to the mix, giving his songs a fuller sound, albeit one that's still characteristically ragged. The intimacy of tracks like "Revelation Blues" and "To Just Grow Away" forgo the urgency of Dylan and Woody Guthrie channeled on The Wild Hunt for a gentle, pastoral domesticity that sounds closer to Arthur Russell in acoustic mode. Though lyrically still driven by Matsson's wandering spirit and kinship with nature, There's No Leaving Now is an adventure close to home, the sound of someone exploring a nature trail in his own backyard.
Still, the most somber and impassioned songs are the ones that stand out. The title track is a wrenching ballad in the vein of "Kids on the Run", while "Bright Lanterns" shakes an angry fist at nature's indifference to even the tallest of men ("Damn, you always treat me like a stranger, mountain"). The simple, affecting "Little Brother" features the album's strongest vocals, and it derives its power from its lyrical clarity ("Why are you drinking again, little brother/ When your rambling's the hardest part of loving you?"), a quality often absent from Matsson's songwriting. His lyrics can feel like a knotty tangle of ambiguous nature imagery and trail wisdom when you take the time to pick them apart. When he sings, "But the lesson is vague and the lightning shows a deer with her mind on the moor/ And now something with the sun is just different since they shook the earth in 1904," he loses the thread, fittingly, somewhere around "The lesson is vague."
That was true of the lyrics on The Wild Hunt, too, but it was harder to be bothered by their lack of specificity when they were lobbed at you with such urgency. There's No Leaving Now dials everything back a few notches: Matsson no longer sings every line like it might be his dying words. On that transfixing "Graceland" cover, Matsson's voice had only two settings: dead quiet and pushed way into the red. There's No Leaving Now finds him instead exploring the spectrum in between those two extremes, and while its good to hear his sound evolving, the results are mixed. It's a pretty and intimately rendered collection of folk songs, but those moments of jarringly direct, piercing emotion are few.
