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On the ninth solo album from the French-based British musician behind Third EyeFoundation, it is impossible to not compare Elliott's delivery to late bard Leonard Cohen. Elliott's accomplished Spanish guitar craft further add to the resemblance, particularly if followe d by Cohen's final album. This is bleak but warm folk, embellished with gorgeous classical arrangements of composer David Chalmin, Gaspar Claus' cello, and bass of Jeff Hallam. Elliott has taken up the saxophone too, but anyone who has seen him on stage already knows that he has in no way altered the striking beauty of his creations. This new album by Matt Elliott under his own name is something of an evidence. There is in this artist a creative expansion force that makes each record, especially since the beginning of his collaboration with the producer and multi-instrumentalist David Chalmin, a capacity to always surpass himself, to always surprise us through combinations that we thought we knew but that, each time, are new. From the tortured electronic sounds of his original project The Third Eye Foundation, started in Bristol in the mid-90s, to the stripped down solo performances with a simple classical guitar and his deep voice, which lead him to play all over Europe, Matt Elliott has drawn a path as singular as it is admirable. Of course, one would like to classify Matt Elliott in one genre or another, but more than a school or a style, the Englishman is finally more in line with a heritage, a tradition rather, that of the complaint, of the song of lamentation which runs from continent to continent, from country to country. From Greek rebetic songs to Portuguese Fado, Delta Blues, Balkan fanfares, Yiddish melancholy or Cape Verdean Saudade, you can hear it all in Matt Elliott's music, the song of an uprooted person, a stateless person, a being outside the world. Matt Elliot sings this infinitely small space, this in-between between intense joy and absolute sorrow, this border between the unspeaka.......
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