Matt Elliott

I was trying to talk to you but you couldn't hear me, I was trying to explain but you weren't listening, so I wrote it down but nobody understood what I'd written

Matt Elliott is the guitarist and founder of Third Eye Foundation, a band that stood out in 1990s Bristol for its experiments blending acoustic sounds, industrial and electronics. After relocating to France in a kind of self-imposed isolation, he embarked on a magnificent solo career that saw him become the erudite author of a deeply inspired, pessimistic, melancholic "sad-folk", one intensely attuned to the emotions and atmospheres his music is able to conjure. If there's been one musician of the 2000s capable of breathing new life into a genre that has spanned decades since Bob Dylan onward - sometimes renewing itself, but far more often just repeating itself - it's probably Matt Elliott, who with "Drinking Songs" reaches his peak and delivers one of the most significant works of the decade.

His is the poetics of the defeated and the marginalized, of those who can't "turn their qualities and aspirations into a commodity" and, precisely for this reason, are treated as refuse by a contemporary society that measures everything by profit and productivity. Just like Gregor Samsa, the cockroach-man protagonist of Kafka's story "The Metamorphosis", Elliott's antiheroes are destined to be ignored or even despised by society until they succumb. From here springs the "songs" trilogy, begun with his second solo album - "Drinking Songs" (2005) - followed by "Failing Songs" (2006) and "Howling Songs" (2008). Elliott's greatness lies in his ability to depict - with spare, stripped-down music - a deeply raw and realistic personal vision of the present, merging singer-songwriter craft and acoustic ambient into a single, repetitive, obsessive mood.

Acoustic guitar, sparse piano notes, cellos, an alienated voice and lyrics pared down to the bone are the perfect tools for building Elliott's parallel world, one that looks at its present - and at the alienation of those who inhabit it - with fatalism and resignation, wary of a future that promises to be inescapably bleak. These aren't howls of rage, nor visions of alternative worlds, but tavern songs for lucid alcoholics, for marginalized people who are aware yet powerless; Elliott's sad-folk becomes the perfect requiem for a contemporary society frantically chasing profit and domination over others. But the artist's marginalization is, in this case, the very weapon that allows for a deeper understanding of reality, compared to the many who are "integrated" into the system and capable of grasping only their own self-interest.

Acoustic guitar, piano and cello immerse us in the album's atmosphere right from the opening "C.F. Bundy". It's a mood that persists through every subsequent track. The visions dictated by high blood-alcohol levels are far more lucid than those of certain "teetotal singer-songwriters" happily wallowing in the rules of the modern music industry. Elliott's minimal sad-folk hypnotizes within seconds of listening. "Trying To Explain" picks up the piano notes of the previous track, this time on guitar, and elaborates on them. A deliberately unintelligible voice symbolizes the alienation and incommunicability of contemporary man: "I was trying to talk to you but you couldn't hear me, I was trying to explain but you weren't listening, so I wrote it down but no one understood what I'd written". The two human types - the "lucid" outcast and the one integrated into the system - cannot understand each other, so different is their language.

On "The Guilty Party" you really do feel like you're in a smoky tavern where a handful of patrons listen, spellbound by such lucid melancholy, to Elliott's words and desperate choruses. The long closing section sounds sung more by ghosts than by men, more by the dead than the living. "What's Wrong" is a relatively more classic folk piece, dealing with death and the madness of human violence: "Flowers for you once again, an eye for an eye only leaves everyone blind". The tragic story of the Russian submarine "Kursk", which sank in 2000 following two explosions caused by a malfunction, killing 118 sailors and officers, is recounted in the eleven-minute track of the same name. Most of the 118 men died within minutes of the explosion, but at least 24 survived and died slowly in the depths, unable either to resurface or to communicate with the outside world in any way. For Elliott, this tragic story is emblematic of human folly: the endless building of machines of war, technology forcing men into situations that go far beyond human nature, Putin refusing any help from foreign countries, and the consequent slow death of the unfortunate survivors in the freezing depths of the Arctic Ocean. Elliott tries to imagine their final thoughts: "It's cold, the water is rising and we're slowly dying. We will never see the light again".

Keyboards arrive, but the mood remains the same: the futility of war in the apocalyptic folk of "What The Fuck Am I Doing On This Battlefield". "A Waste Of Blood" uses voice manipulation to pay tribute to the victims of all wars, though the reference clearly seems aimed at the innocent victims of modern American wars (or, we might say, the wars of capitalism exported through violence), ordered by lobbies and industrialists who profit from them: "Our only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time, that's why we died. The decisions were made by certain industrialists who put a price on everyone's life, that's why we died".

The twenty-minute instrumental closer "The Maid We Messed" revisits Elliott's previous album - "The Mess We Made" (2003) - adding electronics and obsessive percussion, though without altering the mood. If anything, the fast, repetitive rhythms function almost as a hypnotic trip toward the final catharsis.

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

27/01/2019