The Tallest Man on Earth – The Wild Hunt
(Dead Oceans)
Words: James Passarelli

Pretty much everyone, from Bruce Springsteen to Dashboard Cofessional’s Chris Carrabba (don’t worry, I had to look that one up), has gone on a solo acoustic tour, but few artists consistently carry that element into the recording process.  Even fewer do it as deftly as Kristian Matsson.  Working under the sobriquet The Tallest Man on Earth, the Swedish rambler catches ears with his grainy vocal delivery, eccentric finger-picking style, and free-flowing, metaphor-heavy poetry.  And whether he likes it or not, it’s those same characteristics have rendered his name almost synonymous with The Never Ending Tour.  Just about everything anyone’s written about Matsson is spotted with Bob Dylan references.  And with stanzas like “Well it’s a season of thunder/And the season of rain/All the little angels are growin’ wings of pain/ And I see no point in askin’/ There’s no point of concern/ When I steal those wings, well I know I’ll have to burn,” who can blame them?

But three and a half years after the release of his self-titled EP, I think it’s time to abandon the comparisons (or at least accept them with a grain of salt). Perhaps everyone’s been so caught up in all the praise they haven’t stopped to think that maybe such allusions do him a disservice.  Dylan’s obviously a key influence for Matsson, and he’s not about to reject comparisons to one of the forefathers of rock ‘n’ roll.  But one thing is certain.  Matsson is his own artist.  And as much as his stripped down songs hearken back to the days before mp3’s, nothing about his style feels borrowed.  And his second full-length release The Wild Hunt lets us know just how comfortable the Tallest Man is with that style.  He knows what he’s good at, and he’s not about to tamper with it.

The album’s first and title track immediately sets the same jovial mood you’ll find in many of his earlier songs.  The song breathes anticipation of a future escape, Matsson telling us, “I left my heart to the wild hunt a comin’/I live until the call/and I plan to be forgotten when I’m gone/yes, I’ll be leavin’ in the fall.”  It may be his choruses that stick in our heads, but it’s his verses that leave us speechless.  The sheer volume of his poetry makes it all but impossible to pick out just a few favorite lines, but I’ll do my best.  “I got sixteen hundred tigers now tied to silver strings/when they go out in the pastures, oh the mighty heart will sing” goes “Thousand Ways.”  And then, of course, there’s the story of a man’s ambitious dreams to in “The King of Spain”, a song Matsson’s been performing live for the past couple years.  The lyrics seem so effortlessly composed, and that’s what’s so special about The Tallest Man on Earth.  His songs are surely meticulously crafted, both musically and lyrically, but we don’t sense any planning. Each time the songs play like they’re improvised, like they reflect present emotions, not feelings resurfacing from the past.

The whole album seems to anticipate something, whether it’s a change of climate or scenery or some escape to Matsson’s alternate literary reality.  The only time the album that shows signs of lagging is on second and third tracks, “Burden of Tomorrow” and “Troubles Will Be Gone”, but it quickly returns to form with the heartfelt strummer “You’re Going Back.”  And while The Wild Hunt thrives on the familiar, it closes with something altogether new – “Kids on the Run”, a pure piano ballad, emphasizing further the album’s theme of childish escape.  No matter how therapeutic song and dance may be, sooner or later we all have to come back down to reality.  But for a half hour or so, we can let loose in Matsson’s world.

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