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(2019) Boduf Songs - Abyss Versions
Review:
The hushed acoustic dread of Mat Sweet’s Boduf Songs returns after a brief flirtation with electronics. Abyss Versions is much more in line with the minimalist goth of Sweet’s earliest recordings, the 2005 self-titled debut or the following year’s Lion Devours the Sun. This seventh full length is quiet and deadly chilling, a retrenchment after 2015’s Stench of Exist. This time Sweet’s songs are stripped bare and trembling, just a whistle of atmosphere, a tangle of guitar picking, a few lucid notes of bass separate them from whispery nakedness. Existential angst binds the album together — it begins in a vortex and ends in a void — not just thematically but with a palpable shiver. Sweet’s verses have are alienated, evocative, full of murmured violence. “The skies are filled with a light that shines from mouths wide open in screams and sighs,” he confides in the opening stanza of “Gimme Vortex” and if you can imagined a scream that is sighed you’ve got the main disquieting tone Abyss Versions. You might compare what Sweet’s doing with Nicholas John Talbot’s Gravenhurst, the late, wonderfully haunted folk project whose cool toned loveliness masked extremes of horror, despair and dystopia. Boduf songs has the same spectral gorgeousness, the same grave-scented equanimity, as if all the events in Sweet’s softly chanted lyrics have been settled years and years ago. Listen, for instance, to how “Sword Weather” takes shape out of humming, trembling vocal textures, a bee hive of sonics framed in acoustic guitar picking, shrouded in cicada-ish electronics, and yet which is fundamentally one isolated lonely voice, musing on how “fingers break, flowers fall.” When Sweet experimented with denser, more jubiliant textures on his last album four years ago, it worked reasonably well, but this hushed intensity feels truer and closer to his core. Let the chill run down your spine, let the melancholy linger, Abyss Versions speaks to your quietest, deepest doubts.
Tracklist:
Media Report:
Genre: alternative folk
Source: CD
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits |
