The Tallest Man On Earth The Wild Hunt (Dead Oceans)
3/5
By: Stephen Maughan
There is a belief, popular among daydreamers and what Generation X use to call 'slackers', that if you surround yourself with the best of artistic culture, you can't help but soak it up and do something similar. Sadly, the results are often a mixed bag.
This seems to be the case with The Tallest Man On Earth, a young man called Kristian Matsson from Sweden, who on The Wild Hunt lets his creative juices flow to release an interesting, absorbing, but rambling album celebrating his general confusion and loneliness in the world. Still, I wonder if anyone ever told him, 'Hey Kristian, that's good man, but perhaps you need to put the Bob Dylan records away for a time?'
The Tallest Man On Earth – great name, incidentally – sounds like it was made by that boy who is Dylan-obsessed. Every school and college has one. The kind who would harmlessly invite a pretty girl 'to come and have a look at my record collection', and 4 hours later the girl would make her excuses, unable to cope with listening to Dylan's Blonde on Blonde for the tenth time, and having every line and note explained to her. Hell, she probably doesn't even like music, and took our Dylan-obsessed friend to be chatting her up, and didn't realize he actually wanted to play his entire Dylan collection to her.
The problem is, Kristian Matsoon is not Bob Dylan. In fact, he's not Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, or even Kris Kristofferson. For the most part, it's one man and his acoustic guitar with notebooks upon notebooks of lyrics and poems. For those of us who are naturally interested in poetry, the initial excitement of having ten songs bursting with such floral prose soon becomes a little exhausting as Matsson drones on about 'Love is all', still strumming his guitar in the same skilful, but tried-and-tested way.
On the plus side it is only 35 minutes long.
Saying all that, let's be honest - The Wild Hunt is an above average album, and Matsson's determination to see it through his own way is something to be admired. It's an honest album, one that will delight those who believe music is best served up by a poetic boy with an acoustic guitar, a broken heart, and a notebook of his own poetry in his jacket pocket.
I note this record went down particularly well with The Guardian, whose only fault with the album is having a Swedish man “sing with an American accent”. Still, what can you expect from learning English through Bob Dylan albums?
Artists in this article: The Tallest Man on Earth
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