MATT ELLIOTT - Drinking Songs

After the unexpected, disarming and widely acclaimed "The Mess We Made", Matt Elliott continues with "Drinking Songs" his solo path towards sonic atmospheres that, starting from an off-kilter post-rock songwriting, become ever more rarefied, dark and intimate, to the point of losing, at least on the surface, the original imprint of Third Eye Foundation.

Compared to his solo debut on Domino, it's already significant that, for the release of this album, he chose two independent labels that have always stood out for their attention to quality productions with distinctive character: the Spanish Acuarela Discos and the French Ici d'Ailleurs, which among others releases Yann Tiersen, whom Elliott here seems to draw closer to, both in stylistic traits and in the way he opens up "classic" compositions to a plurality of contaminations, first and foremost those of folk and traditional European music.

"Drinking Songs", besides a very long revisitation of the previous album (the closing "The Maid We Mess", over 20 minutes of variously deconstructed miscellany of tracks released there), features seven new compositions with murky, decadent tones, evocative of a spleen that not even the alcoholic oblivion referenced in the title manages to soothe. Elliott indeed intends to communicate and put into music his own dramatic and fatalistic vision of the contemporary world, of which he can do nothing but helplessly acknowledge the irremediable and tragic fate, marked by the madness of war and the arms race in general. Some of the new tracks are explicitly inspired by this pessimistic weltanschauung. "The Kursk" evokes the tragedy of the Russian nuclear submarine, starting with over a minute of unsettling clangs and screeches, which then gradually give way to a long funeral elegy with solemn, oppressive tones, until it fades out into a deafening final silence, a clear and effective invitation to reflection.

The same tones and the same weight of meaning permeate "A Waste Of Blood" - dedicated, as the liner notes state, to all the victims of the reckless US foreign policy - in which Elliott's piano conspicuously recalls the minimalism and compositional iteration of Sylvain Chauveau, traits onto which a mournful, sinister vocal is here grafted, destined to fold in on itself in decidedly ghostly atmospheres, aided also by the manipulation of the vocal element. And yet, the album's incipit seems designed to raise expectations that are then contradicted by the rest of its content, because the opening "C.F. Bundy" first presents a complex, structured weave, through which one can even glimpse a drift towards sounds close to the dreamy soundscapes described by Savoy Grand or Piano Magic (which nonetheless resurfaces here and there), soon overtaken by the now familiar gloomy vocals and a piano with a measured cadence, which then remains to accompany accordions and screeching cellos, in a small baroque-tinged "haunted house" folk symphony, before dissolving into an ever slower closing music-box tune. A similar underlying piano theme is also found in the minimal, cinematic "The Guilty Party", whose flow bears little resemblance to the excited, fleeting euphoria following a joyful bender, but rather to the despair and sense of emptiness following a solitary, alcohol-soaked evening spent in some damp, run-down suburban dive, now close to closing time.

Somewhat lighter tones emerge where Elliott fully expresses his current preference for reclaiming a folk, acoustic dimension (not by chance, the electronic element is present only in "The Maid We Mess" and completely absent from the new tracks). Thus, in "Whats Wrong" the rhythm becomes less gloomy, rising into an oblique, swaying rural ballad, played by an eccentric little orchestra capable of drawing in the listener by telling nursery rhymes with the accordion's dominant accompaniment; while the apparently placid - though no less anguished - "What The Fuck Am I Doing On This Battlefield?" returns to warm, introspective atmospheres through the simple dialogue between the ever-present piano and a vaguely Latin-tinged guitar.

"Drinking Songs", in short, does not seem inspired by the intent of being the ideal soundtrack for carefree indulgence in "wine, women and song", as suggested by the otherwise spot-on cover artwork, whose disenchanted elegance - combined, of course, with listening to the record itself - nonetheless raises the suspicion that, underlying such ostentatious spleen, there might be a kind of self-satisfaction in one's own suffering and in one's helplessness before humanity's tragic fate. For this reason too, the album could be judged either as thoroughly excellent - if one considers the hypnotic intensity and dramatic engagement of many of its episodes to be paramount - or as partially negative, if one limits oneself to a purely formal assessment of its expressive heaviness (both musically and lyrically) and its position in the wake of "The Mess We Made", of which it is nonetheless an undeniable development. Much therefore depends on the listener's starting point and their willingness to overcome, not without a certain degree of attention and goodwill, the depressive aesthetic difficulty of a work that, overall, manages to capture - and in numerous passages, come close to - genuine peaks of dense emotional intensity.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

30/04/2026