This is not one for dinner parties, unless your guests are of the mindset of the characters in the BBC’s famously macabre sketch-cartoon show Monkey Dust who once dined on a freshly murdered tramp.
Boduf Songs – How Shadows Chase the Balance
http://www.kranky.net/ http://bodufsongs.com/
This album comes dressed in black with a Zdzisław Beksiński image of a monolithic mausoleum amid graves adorning the track list on the back. The sense of darkness is emphasised from the off, with an opening lyrical gambit of ‘All of my friends died the same day’. Lyrics about corpses, fear and alienation are half-sung, half-whispered over stark acoustic guitar and creepily atmospheric samples.
The fact that Matthew Sweet (the one man in what is a one-man band) relies primarily on voice and a single acoustic guitar means that he may get labelled as ‘folk’. The thematic obsession with death also fits in with the folk template, it being a genre which (despite the sometimes twee image) is often soaked in blood. Sweet, however does not fit comfortably in that setting or indeed in any other. His music seems to fall outside of categorisation, beyond ‘scenes’ or easy labels.
There is something ethereal and spectral in the arrangements, a kind of unsettling majesty. This is not one for dinner parties, unless your guests are of the mindset of the characters in the BBC’s famously macabre sketch-cartoon show Monkey Dust who once dined on a freshly murdered tramp. An album as dark as a black cat in a coal-mine at midnight, but infinitely more rewarding to listen to.
Words: Rover