The follow-up to Matt Bailey’s 2010 debut *The Three I’s is an eerie exercise in dark minimalism, which sees the Melbourne-based songwriter move away from guitar-based folk rock. His customarily relentless rhythmic chug is replaced by a warm and intimate electric piano. The only additional instrumentation comes in the form of a variety of wind instruments played by renowned jazz improviser Adam Simmons, and the spectral vocal harmonies of Raquel Solier, Nicole Hurtubise and Monica Sonand.

Instead of utilising the space created by his self-imposed musical constraints as a way to open up the songs, Bailey uses it to shut them down, to turn inward. This is emphasised by the brevity of the compositions, most of which are cut short just as they might begin to hit their stride. Bailey cites Scott Walker as an influence on his songwriting on this album, and this is most evident in an all-pervasive atmosphere of dusky gloom, as his tremulous voice echoes through the shadowy landscape of his insular imagination.

02 I An Actress by mattbailey

On occasion he recalls the most downcast moments of his erstwhile band The Paradise Motel, but the drama at work in these songs is even more subdued and haunted. Cast adrift on a sea of melancholia, his sorrowful fictions and interior monologues are expressed as a series of impressionistic sketches, suffused with an air of existential dread. The pace rarely rises above a measured drift, even in its most jaunty slow-dance moments, such as ‘Jacob Joe’, which could be a tranquilized cousin to The Stranglers’ ‘Golden Brown’, if its lyric did not concern itself with memories of an imaginary childhood friend, rather than a hedonistic lifestyle.

06 Jacob Joe by mattbailey

Book Of Illumination circumscribes an interior reality that seems barely communicable: a world of sinister portents, memories of vanished lovers and a deliberate retreat from light. Like a photosensitive hermit, Bailey draws the curtains on the harsh rays of the sun. This self-imposed exile can feel claustrophobic, as it does in the song ‘Home’. Here, social phobia, paranoia and alienation all rise to the surface. The narrator struggles with the contradictory impulses of his desire for solitude and a need for human contact. It’s a universal tale, but Bailey expresses it in a disarmingly direct, yet utterly poetic way.

07 Home by mattbailey

It is precisely through removing himself from the corrupted world of mind-numbing everyday drudgery, fraught human interactions and an over-lit mundane world, that Bailey achieves the distance necessary to describe and define it in the most spare and precise language. Even though he inhabits the same reality we all do, he does not seem part of it. Instead he is a camera, observing and recording the human condition, and translating it into strangely affecting vignettes.

by René Schaefer