Life On Earth!

Life On Earth!  “After A Few Years We Settled Down, Got Kids and…”

from Look!! There is Life on Earth!  (Subliminal Sounds)

electric breakfast by candlelight // Out Now          7.0

It’s been a long, strange trip for neo-psychedelic singer-songwriter-

multi-instrumentalist Mattias Gustavsson, but not quite strange enough.

True, in 2003, he began gathering a crew of fellow rovers and drovers,

like his bandleader in Dungen, Gustav Ejstes, who plays violin on this

ship called Look!! There is Life on Earth! and co-producer

Mia Doi Todd, whose vocals slip around Mattias’ own like mermaids and sirens; and Eric Lundin’s flute, which knows from Rashaan Roland Kirk

and Mozart, too, is Mattias’s right hand;  truly colorful stalwarts of

The Works and Town And Country are also in his constant consort;

Maria Berling’s whistling might well give Andrew Bird himself pause in

mid-flight; aye, and Jon Cullblad’s wineglass is the original harmonica.

Ben Franklin would recognize it; ‘twas whispered that its good vibrations

make its best players go mad as a hatter, but J.C.’s got it in uncanny focus. Mattias even has Subliminal Sounds’ own magisterial mini-mogul, Stefan

Kery, manning the singing bowls alongside Karl Max (no, not Karl Marx,

is it high ye are?)

And true enough that Mattias and company have stepped and
slipped and spun and climbed and done a lot of other moves you can
only do in your dreams, pal: dreams of sunlight and shadow and
Meadow Soprano and meadow muffins, and of something
that “tells you to sell your soul to me,”and dreams of memories
of perfect love “in an undertown by the sea,”and of a recurring,
reverberating UFO shadow, trapped in your tinnitus,

but you gotta sleep it out, that’s what dreams are for; you gotta take the

good with the bad, including obvious philosophical points that have not improved with this reviewer’s age nor Mattias’s youth, except he has

somehow made big beautiful lemons out of lemonade; how’d he do that?

Well, for one thing, he knows how to run the tape or whatever they use

now in reverse, because the studio is his instrument, because that’s what

a studio is now, more than ever, which is enough to keep anybody on their toes, which is his point of course (“Life Turns Fast” is one of his best
songs), and so he doesn’t use rough sonic beasties on a short lease during

shore leave expeditions, like his fellow Dungenites do, on Dungen’s almost equally splendid new Tio Bitar. Oh, he’s got gnarly guitars and so on when

he needs ‘em, but more often on Look!!…, it’s the gentle rain of chamber sounds, themselves, that slip the leash and go skyclad and fall sideways
and so on,  when things have to change. But Mattias is no fool for the
‘nology: he doesn’t multitrack his own vocals as tightly as Dungen’s auteur Gustav does on Tio Bitar, and he doesn’t seem to be addressing the assembled galaxies like G.E. does, and if he did, he might not do it in Swedish (which the G-man does, you got it). Judging by the fact that Mattias always sings in English on Look!!… (And even sounds kind of French, oo la la.)
Mind you, Tio Bitar is not limited to a rhetorical sense, but its conversations and investigations are more among the instruments, including voices, than the thee and me, the Mattias and us, of L!!TILOE!

But all such notions of intimacy, and of philosophical partnership,
and even basic sonic associations with the pastoral, are put to
the ultimate test, when Odysseus has to come ashore one more time,
and get back to the country. Get back to the wife, and kids, where
the piper has to pay. And say, and mean, that he wants you to stop
“playing an act,” even though he knows that could mean the end of
everything, everything here, anyway.

He knows, he’s learning, that he didn’t really want to reach this particular
moment of truth-seeking; indeed, the song is the beginning, or the
something, of “this conversation,” that he straight-out says he doesn’t
want to haveat all. He sounds like he knows  (now, finally!) that there
may well be no “solution” to this situation, and/or to life itself.
(Well, he still sounds hopeful, which is another way of saying he can’t
let it go, can’t let himself or his listener off the hook. Not in this moment, anyway.)

And the seaside café beauty of the music shudders (if your bass is

all that it should be), with its knowledge of all that he knows, all
that’s at risk, “the sparkle of life” that he’s earned the right to sing about,

because of who taught him the song so well, for so long. Ain’t life

even stranger when it’s not strange enough, when you come upon

those “known knowns,” in the desert or wherever, just like the

Secretary said.