BODUF SONGS – Burnt Up On Re-Entry’

BODUF SONGS – ‘Burnt Up On Re-Entry’
This is the first release for Mat Sweet on Southern and where his previous four for Kranky demonstrated a minimalist acoustic purity, BUOR is darker and more dream like, with each lament built upon raw electronics akin to Bright Eye’s Digital Ash In A Digital Urn, or some of Trent Reznors more sedate moments.  From the opening cosmic blurb of ‘Fiery The Angels Fall’, in which Sweet quietly croons “it’s raining men, hallelujah” on top of tin-machine percussion before a QOTSA riff burns up the sky, to the tubular ‘A Brilliant Shaft Of Light…’ and ‘Song To Keep Me Still’, Sweet plays deliberately with solar energy and bleak worlds without diversion.  His spoken whispers adroitly floating across  ‘Wither Thou Ghost, Cretin’ and ‘Everyone Will Let You Down In The End’ like a man devoid of hope, waiting for the world to swallow him whole; and on the caustic instrumental ‘Drexelius Sick Man Quarles Emblemes Closed Heaven’ it happens.  Album highlight is ‘Between The Palisades And The Firmament’, which like every track before it begins with a mournful, spoken eulogy opening up into simple guitar picks and electronic undercurrents.  Despite repetition throughout, Sweet has the uncanny knack of shaping his own environment exactly how he wants it and it makes fabulously mundane yet totally enslaving music that burns brighter than a spark one moment and vanishes into thin air, the next.  Whilst not for the masses, Burnt Up On Re-Entry could prove to be the most dividing and dissecting body of work we’ll hear all year.  (8)
STEVE FLETCHER