The Tallest Man on Earth: There's No Leaving Now Review

Fucking birds ruined the shot.

Album: There's No Leaving Now

Artist: The Tallest Man on Earth

Genre: (mostly) Acoustic Singer-Songwriter

7.6/10

I brought up “Hurricane” by Bob Dylan last week to see/laugh at the dumbass youtube comments, and one of the related videos was “The Gardener” by The Tallest Man on Earth, and I thought, “Kristian Mattison must absolutely hate Bob Dylan”, not because Bob Dylan is a poor songwriter (which would be one of the most inaccurate statements ever) but because critics and fans alike draw comparisons, his voice, his material, his guitar work.  Maybe that’s why he took a darker sounding turn from earlier works like The Wild Hunt or Shallow Grave with his latest release There’s No Leaving Now.

     On this his third studio LP Kristian attempts to alter his own sound, and the perception of the “indie” singer-songwriter.  His acoustic guitar muffles it’s way through a deadened microphone while the lightest of percussion and guitar noodly-bits haunt the song, buried within the mix.  This album still puts Kristian’s unique and biting drawl at the forefront, even with the new added instrumentation.  Kristian is restrained on this record, however, choosing the path of subtly, with accents of soaring melodies at high points of the album and its respective songs.  There is a gentle sadness, but also maturity in his voice, as well as in the songs.  The new sounds present are mostly nice, and add certain interesting tones and contrasts, but for a good portion of the first half of the album I found myself distracted, especially by the lap steel.  The lap steel lines add too much “twang”, and to be brutally honest, add kind of a cheese factor to an otherwise sophisticated song.  The exact same snare drum pattern is used two songs in a row (a simple train-beat utilizing continuous triplets played by brushes, with the latter just keeping it quieter.  The new instrumentation is an element that could have been welcomed wholeheartedly, but seems to be hit-or-miss on this record.

      The best parts of the album are still where Kristian is alone with his guitar or piano.  “Little Brother” takes advantage of fingerpicking and vocal inflections.  The melody in the chorus showcases Kristian’s knowledge of chords and scales, with a vocal line that clashes but soars with the chord changes.  The lyrics are also something to be applauded.  It’s a song about an older brother worrying about how he has modeled for his little brother.  “Well theres a legion of wolves in the forest/And what might of been lost is there I know/Where the crazy young flames loved an older/I feel useless and I have to face alone/All the trials and my unknown.”  “There’s No Leaving Now” is exquisite.  Kristian gracefully floats on a piano, a somewhat new musical path, and his voice is a roller coaster of emotion, it trembles with sadness, glitters with hope, and establishes itself with purpose.  The lyrics evoke both a feeling of hopelessness, and a feeling of courage, perhaps to overcome that hopelessness.  “And when you’re painted like a warrior/Though you know it’s a raining war/When the first who spoke, but wasn’t really sure/Was your heart”.  It’s a culmination and a wise decision of Kristian’s part to name the album after this track.  The theme here is that there’s no turning back, that you can lament and cry all you want but the best thing you can do is head towards the light.

     So here it is, another lyrically strong Tallest Man album, and he sought to make it musically strong as well, but the extra instrumentation falls short of impressive, and muddies some of the tones of the earlier songs in the album.  So it gets a 7.6 Tall Men out of 10.

FAVE TRACKS: There's No Leaving Now, Little Brother, 1904, Criminals