ARTIST: Phosphorescent
TITLE: Aw Come Aw Wry
LABEL: Misra Records
GENRE: Indie
TIME: 62:53 min
SIZE: 71,10 MB
RIP DATE: May-23-2005
RELEASE DATE: Jun-07-2005
WEBSITE: www.misrarecords.com
Track List:
01. Not A Heel 03:51
02. Aw Come Aw Wry #5 00:45
03. Joe Tex, These Taming Blues 05:31
04. Aw Come Aw Wry 01:12
05. I Am A Full Grown Man 05:31
(I Will Lay In The Grass All Day)
06. Dead Heart 05:50
07. Aw Come Aw Wry #3 00:49
08. South (Of America) 04:51
09. Lost Name 05:03
10. Endless Pt. 1 03:37
11. Endless Pt. 2 06:55
12. Nowhere Road, Georgia, February 21, 2005 18:58
Release Notes:
Truly great songwriters hit people in a particular
way - for some it's the sound of Neutral Milk
Hotel's Jeff Mangum or Palace's Will Oldham. Others
hear that extraordinary something in Bob Dylan or
Neil Young - it can't easily be defined and is a
power possessed by only the rarest of songwriters.
It is bold to say, but 26-year-old Matthew Houck is
one of them. As with the illustrious names above,
behind Houck's songs lies nothing but the raw
compulsion to write and play them, the fateful,
joyful yearning to connect - the intuition that
making music, for Houck, is inevitable.
The 26-year-old who now records as Phosphorescent
grew up in Alabama, but the Southern cadence
palpable in his songs is just a portion of Houck's
story. At age 18, after a short attempt at college,
he dropped out and began living out of his pickup
and busking everywhere from New Orleans to the
Southern California beaches for spare change.
Eventually Houck began adding originals into his
repertoire of old folk and country covers and
started booking himself into bars and coffee shops
around the country. On a random stop at a youth
hostel in Austin, TX, a UK booking agent happened
upon one of Houck's sets and bought his
home-recorded CD. A month or so had passed when the
booking agent contacted Houck to book a solo tour in
the UK-so off he went into a cascade of praise from
the fickle UK press, who hailed his Dylan-inflected
folk as a next big thing. Upon returning to the
States, Houck landed in Athens, GA. Turning down
offers from overseas labels and talent agencies, he
abandoned the one-man show, and began again as
Phosphorescent.
Houck's Phosphorescent has recorded two
frighteningly brilliant works, 2003's A Hundred
Times or More and 2004's The Weight of Flight EP,
both released on the Warm label to quiet but lavish
praise. While they weren't widely heard, those who
that did tune in felt the spark in Houck's cracked
voice, wondered at the weird and beautiful poetics,
sensed the involuntary smile behind the lyrics, and
settled in for the ride.
Now, Aw Come Aw Wry moves the band's loose,
ever-shifting arrangements away from the sparse and
melodic and toward the rowdy and unhinged, at times
conjuring a free, revival-tent spirit awash in
homespun orchestrations and brushed with spiritual
and psychedelic undertones. Let the dense and
enchanting intimacy of these personal yet universal
songs soak in, turn them up and sing along. You'll
find not the sterile, self-consciously literate
verses of an English major - this is a poetry that
emanates directly from heartache and joy and lust
and the incomparable feeling of losing and finding
yourself again and again. Wrapped in a gauze of
surreal imagery, and backed by an always revolving
(and expanding) ensemble of horns, pump organ,
piano, pedal steel, fuzzed guitar, choral voices and
percussion, Phosphorescent is entrancing, unruly,
cacophonous. Like a snapshot taken through a moving
car's window, Aw Come Aw Wry is hazy, imprecise, yet
intimates something perfect and possible; it's the
only souvenir you've got of a life glimpsed on the
way to the next town.