In this, the third installment of the Songs trilogy, Matt Elliott continues to celebrate the values and world-views of working class peoples. If Drinking Songs was dedicated to the worlds favorite pastime, and Failing Songs was about the impossibility of hope when faced with the magnitude of the worlds ills, then Howling Songs is the cathartic venting of bottled up pain. Here Matt Elliott is found screaming into an unrelenting wind, and sounding better than ever before.
Over the course of the trilogy a steady improvement in the overall quality of the songs can be discerned. Elliott’s acerbic lyrics and his droll black humor are still evident but the bleakness of the subject matter (the death of loved ones, sinking ships, stockbrokers) is tempered by a musicality even more touching than what was found on Drinking Songs or Failing Songs. Howling Songs is the masterful culmination of the efforts he began with those discs.
The album begins with the elegiac flamenco of “The Kubler-Ross Model.” Elliott sings in his characteristic slurred, downtrodden style. His multi-tracked vocals hover gently over trembling mandolins. The song is an exploration of grief, and a gentle one, until a little more than halfway through, it explodes into a rage of distortion. Anger, depression, and denial, all stages in the grieving process modeled by Elisabelth Kubler-Ross, are ably expressed. The screeching guitars and wall of feedback gradually give way to slow plucking and soft cooing. The sadness remains, but the process of acceptance has begun. He continues on an otherworldly theme with the spectral “Something About Ghosts,” a story of dead man forced to watch his still living lover have sex with someone else.
Elliott doesn’t allow his anger to be buried, a trait I find refreshing. His sulfurous vitriol finds a ready target in the bankers and bureaucrats who have orchestrated the resource wars that have plagued this decade. On the song “How Much in Blood?” he asks, “how much in gold? / what volume of tears will suffice? / what is the index price of life? / and did it fall or rise today?” It is a question to which no satisfactory answer is given. Gleefully, however, he is able to assert “prices will fall / the markets will stall / …we’ll laugh at your name / and dance on your grave.” Gently he serenades the objects of his hate, mocking them in the process.
The album reaches its musical apogee with “I Name This Ship The Tragedy. Bless Her & All Who Sail With Her.” Elliott sings easily here, with clear enunciations, the words falling cleanly from his lips. The guitars, slow whining of bowed strings, and rippling pianos swirl around each other in perfect harmony. Short bursts from some type of brass horn punctuate the tune, giving it added character. These types of little details that often make a song stand out are lovingly applied throughout the album, as with the gravelly time stretched voices at the end of “A Broken Flamenco” and the low-pitched woodwinds appearing on the albums closer, “Bomb the Stock Exchange.”
With Howling Songs Matt Elliott has clearly set a new standard for himself. The intricate arrangements, crisp production, and piercing lyrics make for a jewel of a record.
samples:
- The Kubler-Ross Model
- I Name This Ship The Tragedy. Bless Her & All Who Sail With Her
- Bomb The Stock Exchange
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