Phosphorescent – Here's To Taking It Easy

Including last year’s set of Willie Nelson covers, this is Matthew Houck’s fifth album release under the Phosphorescent moniker. After that enjoyable and fitting tribute this sees him once more presenting his own material (the first since 2007’s Pride), material which – happily – seems to be every bit as strong as before.

Don’t let the upbeat title mislead you though. This is still Houck in hard-drinking, loving-and-losing, tortured and lovelorn mode, and all the better for it. Possessing a voice capable of depicting broken hearts, weary acceptances, wild times and tears, it would be criminal not to use its full scope to describe these emotions. So we see protagonists in every mood, from ‘It’s Hard To Be Humble”’s cocksure defiance, to the downbeat fatalism of ‘Nothing Was Stolen (Love Me Foolishly)’ – “Well apart from the things I touched / Nothing got broke all that much”. Love (chiefly lost) is a major theme, particularly in the three song sequence of ‘Nothing Was Stolen (Love Me Foolishly)’, ‘We’ll Be Here Soon’, and ‘The Mermaid Parade’. Houck’s vocal is at its most wistful, yearning and gorgeous on ‘We’ll Be Here Soon’ and the long, sad, elegiac ‘Los Angeles’ – the regret and sorrow audible in every note.

Another of the joys of this album rests in the intelligent, pithy lyricism. Couplets like “If I’m talkin’ to you mister, then you’d best be writin’ down what I say / If you’re talking to me like that then you’d best be quickly walking away” from the excellent, jaunty yet still edgy opening track ‘It’s Hard To Be Humble..’ or the quite simply beautiful “Our hearts were on fire only two weeks ago / And our bodies were like live wires, down on the beach in Mexico” (‘The Mermaid Parade’) succeed in conveying a whole song’s worth of meaning in just a couple of lines, instantly drawing the listener into their world.

All this is accompanied by some lovely country music. Steel pedals wail, guitars and banjos are plucked and twang, tambourines rattle – always somehow augmenting and underlying the very human lyrical and emotional content. ‘Los Angeles’ has a lusher, fuller, richer musical sound which swells and flows, and works well as the album closer.

Of the many highlights, particularly great are ‘It’s Hard To Be Humble…’, the laconic-cowboy-rhythm-meets-resignation-and-heartbreak of ‘Nothing Was Stolen…’, ‘I Don’t Care If There’s Cursing’ (nihilism! with brilliant rhymes!) and ‘Heaven Sittin’ Down’, reminiscent of another great modern country track, the Broken Family Band’s ‘Devil In The Detail’. Probably best of all though is ‘The Mermaid Parade’, a story of the regret left behind after a relationship fails and ends (“And our two years of marriage / In two short weeks just somehow slipped away”), so realistic as to be heartrending, particularly in the repeated cries of “Oh, Amanda” or “Goddamn it, Amanda / Goddamn it all”. It’s enough, at times, to make the soft-hearted listener weep.

In short, then, this is a really amazing album. Incredibly honest, very human, emotionally brave, musically coherent, with moments of real poetry. Thoroughly recommended, with a tear in the eye.