Matt Elliott - “Dust Flesh and Bones”

I know that I just posted a track from the new Matt Elliott album The Broken Man, but as I sat down to listen to the record again while writing up that post, I realized that I’d need to post another track as well. With a running time of over nine minutes, this one is much longer than the previous song I posted, but it’s worth every second of its length.

“Dust Flesh and Bones” is the best song on The Broken Man, and is in a number of ways the best singular representation of the album as a whole. The entire song is based around a droning, repetitive classical guitar riff, which sounds so beautiful and darkly resonant that it never grows boring. In addition to supplying his deep and distinctly brooding British-accented vocals, Elliott bolsters the song with yearning strings and eerie, choir-like backing vocals. He controls the music with his emotive guitar picking, manipulating the song’s tempo on a whim to create a disorienting sense of urgency about the piece. As the choir swells behind him, Elliott brings the track to a deeply moving climax as he turns the song’s title into a fitting mantra: “This is how it feels to be alone / dust, flesh, and bones”

Matt Elliott’s new record hits pretty close to home for me, and “Dust Flesh and Bones” is no exception. I’ve been listening to it at night before I go to bed, and it always keeps me up. That’s the mark of a truly poignant songwriter, as far as I’m concerned.