In the age of leaks and blogs, it's hard to arrive at music fresh, without someone else's opinion coloring what you hear. One way out is to go see a show without touching the record first. You've got to be careful though, most bands perish on the basis of dull performance at least as much as halfbaked records. Those that survive to build a following do so on the basis of their live chops.
All this throat-clearing to say: I hadn't really heard the records of The Tallest Man On Earth, but I did know he had a Following with a capital F. Enough of a Following to pique my interest. If you're reading this, likely you're part of the capital F, but just in case: the Tallest Man on Earth is a short, slight Swede born Kristian Matsson, attired in skinny jeans and tightly rolled shirtsleeves. He has a single trick, more or less: a titanium-bit coalminer's holler accompanied by a rhythmically pummeled open-tuned guitar. It's a good trick, a durable technique deployed to great effect by Dylan, Dave Van Ronk, Odetta and Woody Guthrie. A cynic might say the form's been played out, but Tallest Man's avid fans would argue otherwise. And Swedes have mastered the art of appropriating genres apparently at will, infusing them with a distinctive metaphorical inflammation:
"Oh once I held a glacier to an open flame
And once I felt like wildcat in the fallen game
But I will fight this stranger that you should fear
So I won't be a burden of tomorrow dear."
An unabashed one-man show, Tallest Man is part standup act. At the Somerville Theatre on Friday night he nattered about getting himself a Red Sox cap and made use of the modest office chair behind his mic the way Bill Cosby was known to do. Drifting or folding into it for mere seconds before the thread of his narrative tugged him out again. He could be seen prowling around, curling over his guitar, then snapping upright to belt out another verse.
Most every song's densely fingerpicked opening was greeted by with grateful applause and Tallest often snuck into the accompaniment via a backroad: chatting or merely pretending tune up. That is until the tightlywound two-chord tension overtook him. The same tension that pulled him away from chair, tuner and sometimes floor. If Dylan had been on steroids in the early albums, he might have sounded like Tallest, which makes the Man's minor stature all the more implausibly gripping.
S. Carey opened the show, performing his debut album that bears more than a passing resemblance to Bon Iver (S. Carey’s multi-instrumental day job, for the moment.) Carey writes the same taut, tranq-Beach-Boys harmonies as Justin Vernon. This genre of somnambulo-folk gives the distinct impression of having been written, a dream recorded in a bedside journal. Carey offset the absence of Vernon’s whippoorwill falsetto with a killer crescendos, doubled-up drums, and yet more harmonies. The result was intensely fragile. In delicate little interludes between proper songs, in the pristine sound of the Theatre, I could barely hear the band over the giggles and shuffles of the still-arriving audience.
