Phosphorescent: Aw Come Aw Wry

Once in a while I come across a record that makes me want to throw out any sort of sensible criticism and just rave. Aw Come Aw Wry is so good, and so precisely the type of music that interests me, that barring any acts of god (or new Mountain Goats releases) I’ll be expecting Phosphorescent to make three or four of my next favorite albums.

Phosphorescent is really one man, Matt Houck, who writes haunting, languid melodies and then cracks his voice all over them. Aw Come Aw Wry belongs to that same late, late hour of night as Tom Waits, past drinking and past exhaustion, out in the weird area where you happen upon revelations that you will most likely forget the next morning.Shelve it with Neil Young, Daniel Johnston, and especially Will Oldham, in the wayward, weary, and broken category.

I suspect Houck has been going to New Orleans funerals, Mexican carnivals, and Texas round-ups, soaking it all in and then releasing it into his wheezing, lurching melodies. There is something of religious fervor to his sound, born out of the murk and shimmer of the Deep South, ending fittingly enough with the sound of a thunderstorm, a sound that, for a displaced Virginian living in L.A., made me so homesick I almost cried.

Eighteen minutes of thunderstorm may seem like a gimmick, but it said something to me; in fact, were it almost any other album, the storm would upstage the preceding tracks. I let my computer screen go black and felt for 18 minutes like I was home.

- Tom Vale
(MISRA Records)