Pick the Cat's Eyes Out

I'm gobbling up Shallow Grave. I'm especially digging the way Swede Kristian Matsson (The Tallest Man on Earth) deftly conflates images of purple mornings and heathery meadows and anything else that would make Thoreau's dick hard with simple, big-boy themes. On the album's title track, we find him poised before a body of water, pockets filled with stones. Maybe the tossed stones will discover the water's dark secret; they also hint at the stones used to weigh the buoyant secret down. Or maybe it's just a standard nostalgia exercise, an adult reflecting on the passing of his childhood -- the referenced "shallow grave" reserved for his days of peach-fuzzy cheeks, rock-throwing idle (idyll), and cheese macaroni. You know, those cheese macaroni suppers enjoyed on paper plates, when you were camping and sitting under the trees and the pine needles fell onto your plate, forcing you to pick through the molten cheese to dig out the needles.

During this song's opening, we hear pretty birds chirping. Other tracks like "The Sparrow and the Medicine" rise and fall to bass-drum accents provided by a tapping foot. Such DAT-machine touches give the album even more of an organic flair. Matsson's earthy mountain folk is quite a departure from the recent product to come off the ever-churning Swede pop assembly line. Among his songwriting countrymen and cheese macaroni eaters, Matsson casts a long shadow.