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Boduf Songs
Mat Sweet is the primary musician behind every band on the Blue Baby Recordings label, a label that he is also the founder and principle head of. As Jonathan Dean mentioned in the final issue of the Brain, Sweet has a battery of talents that spread across musical styles both diverse and exploratory. Boduf Songs is the demo Sweet recorded and sent to Kranky, hoping to facilitate a relationship that might involve future albums. Thankfully Kranky was stopped dead in their tracks by this demo and released it as is.
This nine-track, roughly half-hour pestilence of disguised horrors and nervous tension is about as close to arcane as a musician can be without fully diverging the measure of their madness. While Sweet's other projects range from gloomy metal to sound artifacts stretched across the face of H.P. Lovecraft's grave, Boduf Songs is a deceptively bright arrangement of suggestive colors, all of which point away from the disease and corruption that rides just under his folk impressionism. The opening piece begins much like Skinny Puppy's "Love in Vein;" a succession of reversed strings slide gracefully towards their origin and in every way mark the path forward with anticipation. The comparison is useful because Sweet likes to sound welcoming, but also named this opener "Puke a Pitch Black Rainbow to the Sun." His sometimes dense writing combines gently plucked guitar with the uneasy whir of distant explosions and abrupt interruptions. He uses what can't be heard and what can't be seen to his advantage. His words often sink into the music only to revel in key clearings: words like "slaughter" and "bones" or "trembling" stand out among a slur of words that might otherwise hint at innocence and good fun. "This One Is Cursed" is especially haunting, the use of this technique, perhaps unintentional, makes the lovely melody Sweet uses all the more sickening and absurd in the face of the album's other, more clandestine contents. Aside from his skillful and cunning manipulation of mood and setting, Sweet's compositions are outright beautiful. "Grains" and especially "Ape Thanks Lamb" rely on good songwriting and little else. It's an added benefit that they also burn and spirit away with all the decorations of Sweet's ambivalence. The sweep of stringed instruments (is it a cello or modified violin?) and the swell of their deep bodies fill the album with a grandeur not heard in other acts rediscovering the deep and sweeping beauty of folk-related music. Where others might try to go strictly psychedelic and experimental with an old style, Sweet updates it and makes it his own without straying too far from its inherent attractiveness. He is picturesque and pastoral, using little more than his voice and guitar to create a vivid picture of the world around him. Only Sweet sees a world populated by very dark happenings and very dreadful ideas, all swirling, massing, and waiting to descend on the world.
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