REVIEW: The Tallest Man On Earth – Henry St

It took me quite a while to work out what I didn’t like about Henry Street, Kristian Matsson’s latest record.

From a purely musical standpoint, it’s beautiful. From album opener, ‘Bless You’ – with it’s pared back Nick Drake-y finger pick guitar – through songs like ‘Looking for Love’, in which Mattsson’s guitar is paired with sweetly pleasant piano and strings, and ‘Major League’ which has duetting guitars making a terrific sound, you find yourself thinking, this is a good noise. But something isn’t right.

From a production point of view, the urgent scratchiness of his first two albums is still occasionally present (and it’s worth saying, his first two albums, Shallow Grave and The Wild Hunt, remain his best albums – there was a time there when he felt urgent and new, a man with an acoustic guitar who was actually doing something different – I once saw him performing in an old church in Manchester and it was like watching a young Elvis Presley, so raw was the performance), but it’s a wider, warmer fleshed out sound now. Think Iron & Wine, circa The Shepherd’s Dog.

But Kristian Matsson is no Sam Beam. What is it, I found myself asking? What was it I didn’t like? I played this record the way you scratch sunburn. There were things that niggled (the ooh sounds he makes on ‘In Your Garden Still’, the way he calls himself ‘a little dude’ on the title track). There were – there are – songs I like here (‘Every Little Heart’ is pretty decent in an I am Kloot sort of way and if you were out at a bar, half cut, on a brilliant summer’s day, I imagine ‘Italy’ is the kind of song that would have you asking the people you were with, who’s this? I love this) but there was something that stopped me from embracing this record. WTAF? I should like this. What the actual eff is it?

It’s the writing. It’s the words. It’s the heart behind the songs. It’s the sense that here is a person who has run out of things to say. Listen to a song like ‘Slowly Rivers Turn’. It sounds like post-revelation Ryan Adams (if you’ve not listened to any post-revelation Ryan Adams, check out his covers album of Oasis’ Morning Glory – it’s like staring at a wound, an actual wound holding a guitar, trading on former glories, days in which people cared about what the wound had to say). Which is to say it’s a weak song.

And maybe that’s the crux of the thing. Maybe Kristian Matsson needs to watch Rocky III. Because what the story here is maybe Tallest Man has lost the eye of the tiger. Play a song like ‘Wind and Walls’ from the 2012 album, There’s No Leaving Now – this is as good as Tallest Man gets – and there is nothing here that is a patch on that. There are way too many examples of the kind of bullshit lyrics that Sting and Richard Ashcroft have been getting away with for years. Rivers of time and deserts and all of that bullshit. No thank you. Time for Mr Matsson to arrange his own montage scene.

Before we hear from him again he needs to run up the side of a mountain holding a log, he needs to punch a few sandbags in somebody’s shed, he needs to worry about Clubber Lang taking everything he prizes away from him. Because Henry Street is the sound of a man who has forgotten why he is doing what he is doing.

Words by Pete Wild