Gigwise.com reviews Viking Moses' Crosses

Viking Moses – ‘Crosses’ (Poptones) Released 07/08/06
“"an album about love that begs to be listened to alone”... “

Viking Moses is a shoe-in to be this year’s Antony And The Johnsons, an artist from the left-field who should win over anyone lucky enough to hear his songs. The Missouri-born singer-songwriter, real name Brendon Massei, appeared alongside Antony on the “freak-folk” compilation ‘Golden Apples Of The Sun’, to which ‘Crosses’ is a follow-up of sorts.

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Fourteen tracks of sparse, plaintive folk influenced by Leonard Cohen and Devendra Banhart (Massei used to play in Banhart’s band White Buffalo Deer Woman Appears) may not appear revelatory in itself, though these songs, each and every one of them, are absolutely beautiful: tender and haunting, like Bright Eyes re-recording the soundtrack to ‘Badlands’.

Nope, what really intrigues is Massei’s reportedly un-forgettable live shows: imagine Jose Gonzalez half-way through ‘Heartbeats’ deciding he suddenly wanted to make his audience’s ears bleed by bathing the room in coruscating white noise and you’re somewhere close to the Viking Moses experience. Maybe we exaggerate, but such is his behaviour that ‘Crosses’, such a bare and brittle record as it is, seems all the more startling after reading these reports, a slab of precocious genius more akin to the catharsis that drove Kurt Cobain than just another singer-songwriter.

A joyous celebration of life (“I love the sun that shines on me/God made the sun and God made me” goes ‘Little Emma’s Smile’), a choking embrace of whatever the future may bring, it’s an album about love that begs to be listened to alone.

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