The Tallest Man On Earth - The Wild Hunt

The Wild Hunt is the second helping from the honey tongued troubadour with the most charminging of voices, Kristian Matsson aka The Tallest Man on Earth, Sweden's most eloquent reply to those who say that Europeans just shouldn’t make certain kinds of American music. Matsson is living proof that anyone who can create such vast and immersive songs with just a six string and their vocal chords should be allowed to play whatever kind of music they want. If you can do it well, then do it; that seems to be the philosophy, and nobody does it better than the Swede. The Wild Hunt is a shinning testament to that.
Fans of his first album, thankfully, have every reason to rejoice here with a steady line in the kind of crusty folk yarns that made Shallow Grave such a revelation, only this time he's broadened his musical spectrum. On the piano heavy 'Kids on the Run', a paean to youthful melodrama, Tom Petty and REM are shown up as influences that weren’t as discernible on the debut. Songs like 'You’re Going Back' and 'King of Spain' are also more imposing, demanding of your attention more than anything on Shallow Grave.
Dylan still looms large throughout, that much hasn’t changed. Early Dylan, the quirkely annunciated, words-croaking-out-wisdom-well-beyond-their-years, kind of Dylan. Only Matsson can sing, no doubt about that. In fact it could be said he has the voice that Dylan never had. Which is a good thing. That said, he comes over all Josh Ritter-ish on A Lion's Heart; corn-fed folk lyrics, evangelizing of railroads and rivers or desiring to provoke the bulls of Pampalona with his words, drawn from the same stock of arcane imagery and home-spun wisdom that Ritter mined so superlatively on his first album, Hello Starling. Both men are summa cum laude graduates of the Bob Dylan school of song writing of course. Just listen to Matsson's reedy, tendril-thin vocals curl around the words: 'Our house made of spider webs and the clouds rollin' in/ You bet this mighty river's both my saviour and my sin.' And he's got the gift of the gab on Thousand Ways to: 'Cuz Im the fire in the mountain you have lit up in your dreams/ But also water on the fountain, you could send yourself on me/ You could send your...self on me.'
With lyrics that make you want grab people in the street and force them to listen, delivered in a voice that’ll charm the ears clear off your head, this is the perfect summer soundtrack. It's frankly essential listening.