Thin Lear: Many Disappeared – Album Review

Thin Lear: Many Disappeared

(First City Artists)

LP | DL

Out Now

From the foremost Poet of the Broken Heart and cosmopolitan musician’s musician, we are presented with collected reports of the life less travelled, resulting in this brief yet epic journey into the days of wine and roses. MK Bennett settles in.

So I didn’t know really who was kissing me for the very first instant but now I knew and knew everything more than ever, as, grace-wise, she descended to me from the upper dark where I’d thought only cold could be..
Maggie Cassidy – Jack Kerouac

This man’s brilliance really needs to be more noted than it is. The roadside of troubadour dreams is littered with embittered genius, but there’s still time to save this one from that bar where the story is told about one man’s talents versus his reality, watching the world from the wrong side of a bottle. It meets that thin line of brittle wonder where Townes Van Zandt meets Cohen and the more introspective moments of Neil Young, a brutally high watermark reached more than once on this slab of battered poetry.

Silver Bridge could easily find itself on On The Beach as tribute to some fallen angel, Danny Whitten or Kurt Cobain; it’s beautiful, melancholic flow heavy with resignation as he relates a metaphor or two about loss. The quietly brutal lyrics are half pure wordsmith and half raw journal, a song about standing still because you have forgotten how to move. As with everything he writes, the instrumentation is a perfect backdrop to the narration; this time, it’s spare and spectral, a backdrop to the story rather than the main character. It is Matt at his best, a heartbreaking thing you can hum on your way to church, a lump in your throat before breakfast. Harmony & Gold is a little more epic and sweeping, a little Southern Gothic, a little Elliot Smith, with its big pianos and sweeping drums, coupled with the gorgeous arrangement of hums, whistles and strings. The Band come to mind, a slow waltz toward death with a smile on your face,

“And as the screen door slowly closes
Never wine and never roses
Often sweetness in a cheek kiss
At the ending of a day”

Witness is deceptively upbeat before it reveals itself, tracking despair and resignation muddily through the house of love. It is a wounded slice of Americana you can imagine playing on the jukebox in some Nebraskan diner, full Springsteen references intact. It has what Nile Rodgers suggested, that a happy enough-sounding song can be used to camouflage any lyric it desires. The devastated and devastating words are a eulogy for those lost, wrapped up in a story of learning early, then learning late.

A Cherished Man, like all of Matt’s songs, is a heartbreaker, a kill in the guise of a lament, and another tale dragged from his soul, the characters finding their own solace, despite how things appear on the surface. Everyone finds their joy throughout the day, and everyone makes it home their own way. The presentation again is so achingly beautiful, brushed drums and minor chord piano runs, that the subtlety is overwhelming. You can feel it even if you cannot name it. Not quite David Lynch but definitely Raymond Carver. Mattoon is next, A World Partyesque dance through a distressed landscape, Chernobyl as both literal and metaphoric. Like a gorilla behind glass, its sweetness masks a horror you can’t name. The ascending progression into the chorus is a sing-song melody of quiet emotion, dysphoric yet delightful.

The Haunt wanders through empty rooms, taking its time to show you its secrets, its heart on its sleeve in a slow and bruised few minutes of honest grace. It’s a reminder of a seeming current of narrative throughout the whole thing, a working through of grief, whether familial or fraternal, he is clawing at the edges of something he simply must explain. The songs here return to this again and again, trying to solve a puzzle, a riddle, a killing joke without a punchline. The cracked voice and the brittle and broken piano take you to church, and you can choose your own gods as you see fit. The near ghosts of a pedal steel whisper into the rafters.

Heavy Dreams is a sort of turning, a move toward resolution with its busy drums and big chorus, a hint towards the clouds breaking, the piano stomping toward Big Pink and rolling toward the open heart of hopeful acceptance. The frost may be lifting; a rueful smile spied in the mist. Buddy continues the upward curve, lyrically at least, while the music reminisces on Youngs Helpless, its march through lonely mid-Western hotel rooms and Van’s Warm Love keep it climbing back toward redemption and the light, maybe.

The Visit is positively upbeat, with a near honky tonk barroom piano and a devil may care swing that sits nicely with the rest of the songs here, a break from the introspection, while the lyrics riff on a metaphor of a visit from God or alien life, without a necessary difference. It may be an outlier in terms of the rest of the record, but it sits well second to last, the excellent sequencing just another part of the subtle work that goes unnoticed here, whether it is the top-grade, Grammy-winning production talent or the highly respected musicians in the backing. Ride a white swan, the work is happening beneath the water’s surface. Healing Alone is a beautiful and melancholic end to the affair, in recorded terms at least. A bare bones stark white admittance, underlined. Real stories don’t really have a beginning and end; they keep you awake long after the sentence was passed.

It is an eclectic mix of Nebraska and Tumbleweed Connection that will live in your head rent-free long after the final chords have faded, and another work of quiet brilliance from the pages of Matt’s battered diary.

Instagram | Facebook | Website

~

All words by MK Bennett, you can find his author’s archive here plus his Twitter and Instagram