New Vibrations: The Tallest Man on Earth

The phenomenon has its best expression in TK’s college romper Animal House: John Belushi comes downstairs in his toga, and on the steps are three fawning co-eds with flowers in their hair, ogling a mustachioed beturtlenecked artiste, who is actually Stephen Bishop, real-life-super-lame songster of n.b. 1977’s “On and On,” gently strumming a nylon-stringed acoustic guitar, singing “I gave my love a cherry / that had no stone, /I gave my love a chicken/that had no bones, / I gave my love a story that had no end.”

And before the dude can croon another line, Belushi yanks the thing out of his hands and destroys it against the wall. He hands it back, and with a simple eyebrow shrug, blankly mutters: “Sorry.”

This has been the archetype for treatment of the dude-plus-guitar formula ever since, or maybe just to all forms of classicalist “beauty.”

Since maybe, like Dylan, and then through punk’s splintering off of and subsequent subsumption into indie rock, it seems we like our teeth chipped, our guitars overdriven, and our voices strained.

Which is the basic underlying confusion surround Sweden’s Tallest Man On Earth, Kristian Matsson’s stage name for himself and his acoustic guitar. Matsson crafts songs of striking beauty and executes them in richly harmonic open tunings almost always on his acoustic guitar. He indulges in plenty of sus4’s and relative majors and seems to be the reigning folk king of the intersection of the triumphant and the wistful.

The stark prettiness of the whole affair is somewhat offset by his throaty, and only occasionally Dylan-ish wailing, but it’s not nearly as polarizing as, say, Joanna Newsom, or the yelping of Alec Ounsworth. And maybe the important thing is that it doesn’t come off as an affectation, but maybe just a bit idiosyncratic.

The question is how Matsson gets away with these quaint, shimmering arrangements without everybody wanting to rip the six-string out of his hands and give it the same treatment Bluto might’ve.

One reason, hypothetically, might be that his songs don’t indulge in the same folky flawlessness as English folk. And the truth is that these are more syncopated tunes, certainly born of Matsson’s Scandinavian austerity framing pre-war American music.

But the direction Matsson’s tunes go in is by no means “cool” — the most immediate reference point is Disney.

Especially on tracks like this year’s The Wild Hunt’s “Burden of Tomorrow,” you can practically see Matsson skipping through a coming-of-age montage, hopping across a riverbank on a couple stones which emerge from the water to reveal themselves as, like, a friendly hippopotamus.

Or take The Tallest Man’s latest, the Sometimes the Blues is Just a Passing Bird EP. Here Matsson presents five mostly down-tempo ballads, more subdued for the most part than his other ventures.

The EP features his first electric outing, “The Dreamer,” which is also the only strummed track of the bunch, and features one of Matsson’s more soaring choruses, lending the EP its title (remember that triumphant-wistful combo mentioned earlier?).

The track also is the best example of this weird feature that has seemed to increasingly figure into Tallest Man recordings, which is the tiniest overdubs barely coming through in the mix, hinting that these tracks aren’t unrevisited one-takes but rather neatly attended to “works.”

The peculiarity comes, however, from just how subtle the sprinklings of separate guitar lines, or, for instance, the almost imperceptible gurgling synth arpeggio at the end of “Thrown Right At Me” which closes the EP.

The whole affair is pretty much party-line Tallest Man, if maybe indulging a bit more heavily in Matsson’s sentimental leanings. Perhaps the EP’s only real weakness is how top-heavy the thing is, in that its opener, “Little River” is one of those classic Matsson destroyer melodies, with his vaguely bucolic, nature/mystic lyrics, a song so good it overshadows its totally worthy neighbors.

What’s really interesting, though, about that scene in Animal House, is how they cut back to Belushi a couple times before he actually smashes Bishop’s guitar, and there is this look on his face like he smells something, like there’s something peculiar going on but he’s not yet quite sure what it is.

And no doubt, in this age where the lo-fi is king, and two out of three concerts involve dudes hunched over Macbooks, it’s peculiar that Matsson can waltz in here with just his goofy intonation and dexterous little plinking guitar lines and win us all over.

But somehow, as much as one might want to exhort the Tallest Man to plug in and turn up, it’s hard not to just take a seat on the stairs and fawn along instead.