The Tallest Man on Earth: Sweden's Dylanesque Bard
The Tallest Man on Earth (Kristian Mattson) is actually of average height
I cringe whenever the critics label an up and coming musician "the next Dylan" because it's usually hypervole, Comparing an up and coming performer to Dylan is usually the kiss of death for the the performer. It really doesn't do a service to the performer to be compared to Dylan because doing so sets an impossibly high set of expectations for the listener. Over the years I've heard "the next Dylan" comparison used to describe "used to be" preformers as P.F. Sloan, Barry McGuire, Bob Lind, Peter Mulvey & Lloyd Cole and look what it did for their careers. Bruce Springsteen was about the only survivor of "the next Dylan" tag and as it turned out, Springsteen turned out to be something very different from Robert Zimmerman.
So I was skeptical when AMG wrote the following about Kristian Mattson, a young Swedish folksinger who performs under the name of The Tallest Man on Earth.
Quote:
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The obvious point of reference is early Dylan at his most earnestly folky — a no-brainer, especially given Mattson's richly gritty, slightly pinched voice and densely imagistic lyrics — .... also hearkens back further to the rural sources of Dylan's inspiration, evoking the spirits of pre-war hillbilly folkers and Mississippi country bluesmen, and often more vividly than Dylan himself. The unvarnished but essentially clean recording quality aside, there's little to suggest that these tunes weren't recorded in the American South in the early part of the last century, on the porch of some particularly contemplative backwoods poet.
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As it turns out AMG's review does a pretty good job of describing Mr. Mattson's talent and it's pretty hard to avoid "the next Dylan" cliche when you listen to the music. Like the early Dylan, Mattson performs without a backup band and he almost seems like an anacronism in the age high tech electonica, but it works in his favor because it gives his music a timeless quality. His brand new album
The Wild Hunt is simply the best album I've heard in 2010 and I hope the Tallest Man on Earth survives "the next Dylan" label and keeps making great music own his own terms.
The first song is The Wild Hunt which is the title song of the Tallest Man on Earth's current album:
The King of Spain is the first single release from The Wild Hunt: