If you call your debut album The King of Misery, then you can probably expect some of the initial reviews to focus in on the lyrical content and general lack of cheeriness in the tunes. But is ‘The King of Misery’ a fair and apt title for Daudi Matsiko? I will try and interrogate that question over the rest of this review.
Opening song ‘Guilt’ would add weight to the yes column. A slow, gentle, and simple acoustic number which features lyrics such as ‘secretly I’ve not been breathing/surprised you’ve not mentioned how I’ve been’ and ‘wasted time but now I need it/I’m not the answer that you need/I carry guilt from other seasons/so I don’t expect you not to leave’ is hardly going to be a happy little jig. But it is a great introduction to the album. While we will later see some grander, more layered pieces of music – this opener allows Matsiko to put their voice and words front and centre, leaving the listener in no doubt about the kind of artist they’re dealing with here.
The guitar picking that opens ‘oMo (Man)’, though, immediately feels cheerier. While lyrics like ‘Now death has chose his victim/Well, you slept on all those corpses’ might suggest the misery is still strong, there is a real warmth to both the music and the vocal performance here. It’s with the third song ‘Falling’ that we get the first real sense of Matsiko not just as a capable and captivating singer-songwriter, but also an experimental and daring musician. The instrumentation is bare here – very bare – but the use of his voice to sing what seems like a pretty abstract poem is enough to really draw the ear. I’d be lying, though, if I said it was at all happy (yay to misery).
Over the next few songs we begin to see the layers emerge, both in terms of the musicianship and personality. ‘Fool Me As Many Times As You Like’ adds some discordant brass instruments. ‘I Need To Stop Calling My Phone’ starts with droning synths that are so intense that every time I’ve heard them I have briefly believed that Spotify has skipped to an industrial album, before switching into the quietest but most terrifying song on the whole LP. And sandwiched between these two songs comes the album’s absolute highlight. ‘Derby’s Dose’ makes the best of Matsiko’s abilities as a guitarist, but also features the most honest and involving lyrics we hear here.
It is with two of the final four songs, though, that you begin to question if Matsiko really is just a ‘king of misery’. The title song does not sound at all cheery on the surface, but as he tells us that he is ‘doing the best I can’ and that ‘misery’ ‘is not who I am’ we see that we are dealing with someone who, while fighting demons, is also strong and willing to fight. Finishing the song with a beautifully sung ‘fuck off’ to the ‘voice inside’ is a powerful way to show your resistance. And finishing the album with the cheerier tone of ‘I Am Grateful For My Friends’ is another way of saying that while the writer of these songs may have been frank and clear about their struggles, they are also fighting them through connection and music.
So, is Daudi Matsiko the ‘king of misery?’ He certainly does misery well – and as someone who loves miserable music, that can only be a good thing. But misery is not the overwhelming feeling I come away with here. These songs are so full of warmth and charm – the music so interesting daring – the performance switching between sweet, pained, and empowered – that I can only come away from this album feeling excited for having discovered an amazing musician.
Words by Fran Slater
Picky Bastards 
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