Review Summary: It is so cold outside, but I have already scheduled my 6AM brooding in the moorlands.
In the ranks of under-the-underground folk musicians and folklorists, hardly can one find a figure as celebrated and simultaneously unknown as Matt Elliott. His record
Drinking Songs has received widespread acclaim, but in a rather unusual way. A constellation of hearsay, accidental internet algorithms, and some fortunate finds contributed to its slow, slow, slow rise and popularity that took over a decade to fully grow. Every self-respecting depressed enthusiast of gloomy singer-songwriter music has heard it, and yet everyone was still somehow too late to the party. As for Elliott, he has spent those years of amassing acclaim quietly recording, performing, releasing his stripped down, skeletal ode of disenchantment, often to no notice. That is, until people noticed again and albums like
Howling Songs or
The Broken Man started receiving traction with years passed too. 𝐩⃥⃒̸𝐞⃥⃒̸𝐜⃥⃒̸𝐮⃥⃒̸ 𝐥⃥⃒̸𝐢⃥⃒̸𝐚⃥⃒̸𝐫⃥⃒̸
On a particularly cold spring, a surprising quaint record entered the light of being.
The End of Days now sits comfortably among Elliott’s other releases, although said comfort is one of deep freeze and one’s own company. It released to no fanfares, no grand promotion, and certainly as quietly as Matt’s own energy on the record creeps. Now, let’s wait some year or two for people to gradually be noticing. In these recent years of avant-folk and chamber music of various oblique shapes and influences taking flight, with the likes of Daniel Rossen, Patrick Watson, or Marissa Nadler being as popular as they are, there is great room and potential for Matt Elliott’s raspy, rusty, brash coyness to take off retroactively as well. Not for nothing, those drooling over Leonard Cohen every charm must surely rejoice at finding this coarse deep-voiced shaman.
Opening on a sombre – and yet still album’s most upbeat – note, the title track flows like a half-frozen creek approaching springtime. The eponymous “The End of Days” moves at a glacial pace (I am certain a slight of denizens will appreciate that), constantly droning circles around a frosty tune, cyclically picking up instrumental palette as it progresses, climaxing in klezmer-like croonings. Its runtime of nearly ten minutes may prove tiresome to many, but also excitingly breezy, steadfast for others. The ole trash’n’treasure paradigm. In a fashion “The End of Days” culminates, “January’s Song” continues. All dominant instruments of the album (guitar, double bass, saxophone, piano) are present and slithering on from the get-go. The cut has a more immediate atmosphere, unease and isolation come to mind, what with its shorter run and more pronounced melody.
“Taking splinters with your fingers is an art” and the splinter-picker extraordinaire Matt Elliott made an art of plucking his strings like the sores they give grant curses. Such is truth for “Song of Consolation” and the purely instrumental “Healing a Wound Will Often Begin with a Bruise”. The former sees Matt at his wordiest. As in he still says very little but says it in a pretty way. At nearly 6 minutes, this is still among the shortest tracks on the album, yet he sings as much as on any of the longer goliaths here. The latter flows almost like a tropical suite, exchanging the rapid plucking with genteel mellower moments, fluctuating between major and minor keys, inflecting like a cartoonish Englishman berating foreigners.
By “Flowers for Bea” a familiar theme reappears. The finish of the opening title track has its stripped-back (believe it or not, this album can be stripped back even more) variation lay in foundation of the whole massive structure. However, …
SOUND THE ALARM
Who let that scuzzy electric guitar in? Lock the doors, children. Nobody leaves. No, don’t act like it did not just drive in a drilling guitar solo amid all this tenderness. If I were walking through the steppe, as I do oft every morn, and had a buzz this ballooning shrivel through the horizon, I would most definitely crapper my patter. Unbelievable.
That odd, not entirely welcome insertion aside, the whole song flows on like sand in the hourglass. Its eventual repetition of the chorus in chants hone in the quiet disquieting sense of isolation, distance, coldness. How he so casually sings of flowers, where none may grow here is quite unkind. But things return to normal come the closer, “Unresolved”. Its charge in life is to pack more key shifts and instrumental subtleties into the shortest runtime on the album. In 4 minutes, the track moves with wind-like ease through themes and motifs casually touched upon throughout the album, atmospherically playing hopscotch with drowsy dourness and upbeat tropicale. In this,
The End of Days summarises itself succinctly like a bookend that it is.
The whole way through you are subject to a melancholy of disintegration. A lullaby for the end times, if you will. Matt Elliott, no stranger to cynical views of Armageddon, constructs a bleak farewell ode, capable of fitting neatly into either side of the crepuscular time, from morningtime frosty dew to warmth’s decline come darkness. Matt is largely disinterested in appeasing or appealing to those eagerly awaiting a crescendo, melodic chorus, sugary harmonies, etc, for in the end times nothing will be left to serve and please you. He has written drinking songs for the depressed perpetual drunkards, he has written failing songs for the oppressed perpetual losers, he has written howling songs for the repressed perpetual introverts, he has even written resignation songs for the unimpressed perpetual jaded folks. He now sits comfortably in his newest nest of ending songs for the rest, all of us, perpetually veering towards the end, able to greet it with nothing but a shrug and an I-told-you-so. But we have all told you so. So none is now left to whom to tell it.
Can you hear the birds sing?
