Primavera Preview: The Tallest Man On Earth

Kristian Matsson, aka The Tallest Man on Earth, of Dalarna, Sweden is one of those looming breakers in the folk scene. He’s toured with Bon Iver and will soon be supporting John Vanderslice. I’m not going to try and avoid the comparisons to early Dylan, because his debt (you could say his carbon copying) is rather blatant, if not entirely similar vocally, the tone is incredibly close to the early Columbia recordings. But that, after all, is quite an achievement.

I have mixed feelings about his music. When I first came across his MySpace page I was pretty struck by the quivering acoustic picking and the grave, bluesy delivery of his image based lyrics. “Have you ever seen the far side of a mountain swallow the sky” he sings on It Will Follow the Rain, hosted below in a YouTube video. They’re the kind of lyrics that work on a subtle level: even people who haven’t seen such a sight may well feel like they have, if they are susceptible to the broody blues-folk style of which he is masterful and certainly inventive, albeit within stylistic parameters that are book-ended by 1965.

He plants his images with authority, and the tunes are memorable. He marries the poetry to the mood of each piece, I suspect that the one grows out of the other giving the music it’s tightly bound feel. This is all well and good on a relatively anonymous MySpace page: The songs are less of an anachronism when filtered through his vinyl-crackle lo-fi style and not cross referenced with the image of an image conscious young Swede. But aren’t we all image conscious young Swedes these days? Maybe not.

When he stands up and delivers these songs on the Pitchfork stage at eight forty-five on the Thursday night, between sets of such “contemporary” indie from acts like Women and Wavves will he be able to pull it off? Will the dreamy abstraction of his lyrics and the earthy Americana guitar picking be able to surpass those awkward, itchy feelings that this has been done better before? Although Dylan was a copy-cat himself at least he could call English his first language… There is a school of thought which says none of this matters, but I remain to be convinced, albeit intrigued and certain that I will be there to see it; drawn by the majestic beauty and sense of pastoral freedom that he has captured on record so well.

The Tallest Man on Earth – It Will Follow the Rain: