The Tallest Man On Earth’s “Dark Bird Is Home” illustrates the artistap precarious state in the wake of a divorce, and in no uncertain terms.
Singer/songwriter Kristian Matsson is first and foremost a myth-maker. Despite his stage name, you won’t find him in a Guinness Book of World Records. (In fact, at 5”7, he’s shy of average.) His songs play out from the vantage point of a Thoreauvian vagrant, entrenched in the woods, watching a sparrow dive into a lake and pontificating that
This time around, the blues perches firmly on Mattson’s shoulder. “Dark Bird Is Home” illustrates the artistap precarious state in the wake of a divorce, and in no uncertain terms. Through all the wilderness metaphors, it can be hard to see the forest for the trees in Matsson’s lyrics, but “Dark Bird” is his most lyrically direct and adept.
As if for moral support, Matsson brought in a backing band on the album, constituting the biggest shift in his style to date. For an artist whose folk guitar and raw voice gets him held up next to Bob Dylan on an interview-by-interview basis, the song’s featuring the band are sure to bring him Springsteen comparisons. “Darkness of the Dream” and “Sagres” in particular share the splashy drums and tambourines of the Boss’s most anthemic hits. Like “Dancing In The Dark,” the loose stomp of the album’s deserved single, betrays the emotional bloodletting Mattson endures on it, grappling with the doubts inherent in leaving the love of your life for good.
It’s far from a one-note dirge, but most of “Dark Bird” is spent outlining meditations in an emergency. Not all deal in heartbreak—some are merely activated by it. “Little Nowhere Towns” recalls the towns of Mattson’s youth admixed with the memory of an impassioned shouting match, the words of which he furiously scribbles down in the interest of “selling emptiness to strangers.” Like a microcosm of the album’s whole, itap a borderline uncomfortable look at Mattson’s psyche, a state of self-loathing in a moment that many could relate to but few are wont to admit.
Before “Dark Bird Is Home,” this was a chord that Mattson was unlikely to strike with his listeners. As Tallest Man On Earth, his strong suits were tall tales about , or the tyranny of the road (“Fields Of Our Home” and “Slow Dance” do play on the latter in an inverted way). Now, instead of pastoral landscapes or flapping birds, we get a woman on the album jacket, and with it, new humanity inside the cover to boot. The axiom that suffering makes for great art is only as true insofar as how the artist handles it. Matsson proves his mastery on “Dark Bird,” ultimately rising above his mire in more ways than one, refraining on the album’s eponymous closing track: “This is not the end, this is fine.”
