Swedish singer-songwriter Kristian Matsson, who is not the tallest man on earth, is following a Dylanish musical progression: after three albums of wordy folk minimalism, he’s reached his noisy stage – and it’s promising. Opening track Fields of Our Home starts understatedly, with Matsson’s high, arid vocal lines shadowed by a banjo, but acquires layers of guitar, brass and keyboards which gradually swamp his voice. When the massed weight of the instruments kicks in, there’s a triumphalism that recalls Simple Minds in their stadium pomp. Thus emboldened – “So fuckin’ unafraid,” he asserts on Darkness of the Dream, an elegiac soft rocker that could have figured on Jackson Browne’s Running on Empty – he bathes in sound. Sagres’s sumptuous drivetime cocoon of electric guitar and keyboard would make Tom Petty take notice; the fluttering violin/guitar interface of Singers is equally pretty. Lyrically, Matsson is more than usually opaque. The album’s theme is the break-up of his marriage – as the acerbic chorus of Timothy goes: “She said, ‘Why are you so complicated?’” – but he doesn’t give much else away. No need: Dark Bird is lovely as it is.
