#boduf songs

[doggerell]

My Continuing Battle With Material Reality // Boduf Songs

I am what I have seen A temporary hold

[dustedmagazine]

Horse Jumper of Love — Disaster Trick (Run for Cover)

Photo by Pond Creative

Horse Jumper of Love’s second album blows out introspective songs into wailing crescendos. Guitars bristle, flare and dissolve into fuzz, while quiet, contemplative lyrics unfold in the hurricane’s unblinking eye. “Wink,” the first single, spools out in chilled post-rocking chords, drums kicking up dust in the long sustained intervals. The singer, Dmitri Giannopoulos, sings in a shrugging, self-effacing tenor, navigating twisty melodies with an unhurried, unbothered nonchalance. The song is a battering ram and a weighted blanket, equal parts brute force and solace.

The music has undergone a shift since Heartbreak Rules, from 2023, an album I liked a lot. That record was a mostly solo endeavor, just Giannopoulos singing songs he’d knocked out during COVID quarantine and John Margaris coming in late to play a few piano parts. This one is much more of a band effort. Margaris plays bass throughout, and James Doran drums. There are guest appearances from of-the-moment indie rockers including Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman, MJ Lenderman and Ella Williams of Squirrel Flower. Though still morose and inward-looking, the songs bloom into sprawling, distorted, nocturnal flower. They are larger but very personal.

“Snow Angel,” for instance, establishes a slow acoustic strum, then blows it to bits with fuzz. The sound coils and uncoils, storming ahead with inexorable anthemic vigor, then turning inward on itself in wounded dissonance. “Curtain” strips back the Horse Jumper experience to flared electric chords and vocals. The song digs into the bleakest existential questions—the self, its relation with others, mortality — in clean, echoing isolation. Giannopoulos croons, “Do you think yours is the only point of view? Do you that think others haven’t done it, too? Did you follow that nasty rule? You wave that goodbye and they close the black curtain on you.”

The sound is mesmerizing, pitched somewhere between Polvo’s guitar-wrenching abstractions and David Grubbs’ surreal sung poetry and Bedhead but with more explosions. Ovlov comes to mind, too, in the tactile onslaught of distorted guitar sound. Yet the words are good, too, if hard to catch, as they bob up to the surface of guitar skree, then sink under again. “Lip Reader” has one of the disc’s most arresting images, in a verse that goes, “You were singing your song in the doorway/I could see you in the other room/like a lip reader from the other side/you’re from another side.”  The line between the living and the dead, the real and the imagined, is wavery and blurred.

At times, Giannopoulos recalls other, far more acoustically centered artists. The spare, stark “Word,” for instance, sounds a good bit like whispery, gothic Boduf songs. The trick he’s mastered, however, is hitching vulnerability to blaring, swelling, overwhelming guitar sounds. It’s not often that music this loud and distorted can break your heart.

Jennifer Kelly

[skin-bible]

Kind of a fear and hunger song

[emojunkdog]

dazed

[dealgemeneverwarring]

De Algemene Verwarring #107 - 19 February 2024

Episode one hundred and seven of De Algemene Verwarring was broadcast on Monday, February 19, 2024, and you can listen to it by clicking on the link below that will take you directly to the Mixcloud page:

Pictured below is, well, you know who is pictured below don't you? Yes, it's The Birthday Party. Last week I saw Mutiny In Heaven, the documentary about the band made by Ian White, and it was fantastic, for several reasons. First of all, it was a pleasant re-acquaintance with the angry, dangerous, aggressive Nick Cave, who I like a lot more than the quiet and sad Nick Cave we have seen the last few years, and I'm saying this with all the respect I have for the man's tragic losses, I mean, I admire the way he copes with all of that, but musically he has lost me a bit. Of course I was too young to have consciously known The Birthday Party, and I don't really remember 100 % when Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds came on my radar, I think I picked up the Kicking Against The Pricks and Your Funeral My Trial lp's up from the Kortrijk library (again, endless thanks to the Kortrijk library with their fantastic collection), but I don't know if that was before or after I bought the 1988 Tender Prey album, but anyway. The Birthday Party, the aggression, the feedback, the unique guitar sound of Rowland S. Howard, bass god and naughty boy Tracy Pew, the always quiet and sober (except that one time) Mick Harvey and the primitive drum sound of Phil Calvert, they were truly a force. The drinks, the drugs, the pills, and the hunger. The loathing of London, but not exactly a rebirth in Berlin. The making of the Nick The Stripper video. Just go see it. Also fantastic was the entry into the cinema of an elderly couple, they were too late so they had to sit on the front row but then looked around and noticed some more empty seats in the fourth row, so they went there, asked some people to move, and then sat there for ten minutes, after which they left the cinema again. Wrong movie? Wrong Nick Cave? Too loud? Who will tell? Anyway, I'm playing Deep In The Woods in the show, a song that I have always liked a lot because it showed the way Cave would slowly move towards what would become The Bad Seeds but still has that distinctive Rowland S. Howard feedbacking guitar.

There is also a lot of other music in the show, from Dead Nittels, Dat En Wat, The Velvet Underground, Boduf Songs, People Skills, Collate, The Vanishing, Violent Change, The Triffids, Drifting, Z'EV, Organ Of Corti and more! And beneath the photo you can find the playlist for th show. Enjoy!

Playlist:

Dead Nittels: Justizirrtum (7” “Anti New Wave Liga”, reissue on Bachelor Archives, 2020, originally released in 1983, not on label)

The Primate Five: I Need Your Luh (7” “The Primate Five vs The Traditional Fools” on Goodbye Boozy, 2021)

Dat En Wat: Dead Man Blues (LP “Diggin’ For Gold Vol 2, reissue on Rubble Records, 2018, originally released on Smorgasbord Records, 1994 and in 1966 on & 7” on Soho Records)

The Velvet Underground: Foggy Notion (LP “VU” on Verve Records, 1984)

Violent Change: Fabio’s Playhaus (LP “Starcastle” on Sloth Mate Productions, 2023)

The Stroppies: Cellophane Car (LP “Whoosh” on Tough Love Records, 2018)

The Triffids: Raining Pleasure (12” “Raining Pleasure” on Hot Records, 1984)

Boduf Songs: Decapitation Blues (Redux) (7” “Split” Jessica Bailiff/Boduf Songs on Morc Records, 2013)

People Skills: Flag For Gravity (LP “Hum Of The Non-Engine” on Digital Regress, 2023)

The Birthday Party: Deep In The Woods (CD “Hits” on 4AD, 1992, originally released on the 12” “The Bad Seed”, 4AD, 1982)

The Psychedelic Furs: It Goes On (LP “Talk Talk Talk” on CBS, 1981)

The Vanishing: White Walls (LP “Songs For Psychotic Children” on Gold Standard Laboratories, 2003)

Collate: Obliterated By Flowers (LP “Generative Systems” on Domestic Departure, 2023)

Al Karpenter & CIA Débutante: Put On Your Mask (LP “Al Karpenter & CIA Débutante” on Ever/Never Records, 2023)

Z’EV  For Manfred (LP V/A “Dossiers” on Dossier Records, 1986)

Drifting: Finding New Age In An Abandoned House (LP “Dream Autopsy” on Förlag För Fri Music, 2023)

Organ Of Corti: Halucinatio (CD “Fanaticus” on New Forces, 2024)

[musicmakesyousmart]

Boduf Songs - Stench of Exist

The Flenser

2014

[zoeflake]

Boduf Songs – 27th Raven's Head

Video:  M. Sweet & S. Shearing

[buttererer]

Boduf Songs - Quiet When Group (2008)

[doggerell]

Boduf Songs and the Depeche Mode vinyls on today for my writing sess…..

[inkhartoum]

[dustedmagazine]

Boduf Songs — Abyss Versions (Orindal)

Abyss Versions by Boduf Songs

The hushed acoustic dread of Mat Sweet’s Boduf Songs returns after a brief flirtation with electronics. Abyss Versions is much more in line with the minimalist goth of Sweet’s earliest recordings, the 2005 self-titled debut or the following year’s Lion Devours the Sun.  This seventh full length is quiet and deadly chilling, a retrenchment after 2015’s Stench of Exist, of which I observed that “moody synth textures and blipping, buzzing electronic elements turn Sweet’s existential inquiries into something gleaming, futuristic and engrossing.”

This time Sweet’s songs are stripped bare and trembling, just a whistle of atmosphere, a tangle of guitar picking, a few lucid notes of bass separate them from whispery nakedness.  Existential angst binds the album together — it begins in a vortex and ends in a void — not just thematically but with a palpable shiver. Sweet’s verses have are alienated, evocative, full of murmured violence.  “The skies are filled with a light that shines from mouths wide open in screams and sighs,” he confides in the opening stanza of “Gimme Vortex” and if you can imagined a scream that is sighed you’ve got the main disquieting tone Abyss Versions.  

You might compare what Sweet’s doing with Nicholas John Talbot’s Gravenhurst, the late, wonderfully haunted folk project whose cool toned loveliness masked extremes of horror, despair and dystopia.  Boduf songs has the same spectral gorgeousness, the same grave-scented equanimity, as if all the events in Sweet’s softly chanted lyrics have been settled years and years ago.  Listen, for instance, to how “Sword Weather” takes shape out of humming, trembling vocal textures, a bee hive of sonics framed in acoustic guitar picking, shrouded in cicada-ish electronics, and yet which is fundamentally one isolated lonely voice, musing on how “fingers break, flowers fall.”  

When Sweet experimented with denser, more jubiliant textures on his last album four years ago, it worked reasonably well, but this hushed intensity feels truer and closer to his core.  Let the chill run down your spine, let the melancholy linger, Abyss Versions speaks to your quietest, deepest doubts.  

Jennifer Kelly

[poison-doll]

i built a house for my mistakes

[musicmakesyousmart]

Boduf Songs - Inviolate Projection, Blood from Rome

Bluesanct

2009

[findasongblog]

A few albums for you to check out!

CHAMPS - The Hard Interchange

Three years in the making, the twelve-track record represents the highs, lows, heartbreak, adventures and everything in between.

"We've lived with this album for a long time and we're really very excited to be able to set it free. We hope you enjoy listening to it as much we enjoyed making it.” (press release)

The Switch - Birds of Paradise

Following the outfit’s previous bodies of work “We’re Fooling No-One” and the Norwegian Grammy-awarded “The Switch Album”, they return with fifth full-length “Birds of Paradise”. Lead-vocalist Thomas Sagbråten and co-author of the bulk of the album says “We tried to make a musical universe with slightly different laws of nature than real life. A bit less gravitation. The air is thicker. It’s hyper realistic, but also unreal.”

From budding seeds to the overarching themes of this viridescent volume, the septet hones something every-bit stylistically varied, surrealistically inclined and tactile, like a brightly plumaged exotic bird lost in the upper stretches of the northern hemisphere. (press release)

Boduf Songs - Abyss Versions

Boduf Songs’ seventh album and first on Orindal Records (Gia Margaret, Julie Byrne, Advance Base) marks the Ohio-via-Southampton artist’s most detailed album yet, somehow voyaging into deeper recesses than ever before.

Mat Sweet, the solitary figure behind Boduf Songs, has spent the better part of fifteen years cultivating an idiosyncratic strain of quiet menace, augmenting library-hushed vocals and brooding guitars with psychedelic flourishes from processed loops, field recordings, and distant, subliminal atmospheres.

Subtly acknowledging Boduf Songs’ beginnings, Abyss Versions echoes motifs from the first Boduf Songs album (2005’s Boduf Songs on Kranky Records), forming its own secret, circular path, encapsulating the journey from there to here. Sweet’s background in doom metal still seeps into the quiet, pensive world of Boduf Songs via mood and tone, balanced by shades of the fingerpicking mysticism of his first four albums. As always, the music of Boduf Songs is steeped in a palpable sense of darkness and dread, offset by a gorgeous and discreet sonic beauty. There is much prettiness here, albeit within an inescapably unsettling frame.

Throughout the album, sonorous melodies mix with the grind of drum machines, esoteric bleeps and bloops, and reversed tape experiments, all in counterpoint to the morphine-addled guitar and grimdark velvet vocals. There are haunting, dreamlike elements, the aching time/no-time uncanny sad-charms of some far-off Gene Vincent/Chet Baker number never recorded from an alternate Lynchian universe. Sounds emerge into the light then fade back into the darkness as repetition and hypnotic drone play against the movement. Forward and upward, we move without moving.

Abyss Versions is full of love, and the expanse of things outside of us, the slow, elegiac stir of echoes, the mixed blessing of memory, the sensation of rot and longing. A letting go. A refusal to let go. The static that carries you off, the swell of feeling that is delicately tuned away, the whisper of consciousness, snuffed gently out. An opium dream, curling smoke spiralling into the blackness of a dimmed room's ceiling, meditations on mortality and the void for those who travel by night. (press release)

Joshua Radin - Here, Right Now

Internationally acclaimed singer-songwriter Joshua Radin shares a heartwarming new album “Here, Right Now.”

Produced by Tony Berg with an array of guest vocalists and musicians, including Berg’s daughter Z Berg, Maria Taylor, Alex Greenwald (Phantom Planet) and Danny Burke, Here, Right Now is comprised of seven original tracks and two covers (Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down” and The Rolling Stones’ “She Smiled Sweetly”). Each track tackles themes of broken relationships, rescue, friendship and self-determination, all delivered with Radin’s trademark silvery, intimate tenor. (press release)

Wildwood Kin - Wildwood Kin

Completely fulfilling the band’s artistic vision, it’s as natural as it is accomplished. The trio’s vocals harmonise effortlessly, there are shades of Simon & Garfunkel, Bear’s Den and early Fleet Foxes in the beautifully gentle melodies, and its lyrics address profound themes like love, loss and spirituality. But above all, there’s a spirit to the record that’s as wild and free as the West Country moors where they grew up.

The songs are all built around messages that Wildwood Kin believe in. The warm-hearted ‘All On Me’ is similar in spirit to ‘The Weight’ by The Band, a song about sharing the load with someone. ‘The Crown’ addresses the rise of political showmen, and asks if any would actually stand up for what they believe if their power was stripped away. The strident ‘Time Has Come’ is both a female empowerment anthem and a reminder to not let yourself be crushed by circumstance. Wildwood Kin may have an unusual gift for harmony, and a way with evergreen folk rock melodies, but ultimately they’re three normal, relatable young women finding their way in the world and dealing with the same challenges, triumphs and tragedies as the rest of us. That connection, acceptance and, ultimately, love is captured throughout this beautifully reflective album. It is a tonic for our times. (press release)

[trysteroo]

SONG OF THE DAY Thwart by Thwart -- Boduf Songs