Sunken Treasure: music you may have missed

Before he moved to Athens, Georgia in 2001 to start recording under the name Phosphorescent, Matthew Houck had taken his one-man band show on the road, roaming the world while letting the music be his guide.

The value of this experience is easy to detect in the scope and maturity of his early work. His cracked, distinctive voice seemed uncommonly wise, with depth and authority.

Houck's farseeing way with words was another sign that here was someone who was going places. There's a swagger and restless energy to his first two records, A Hundred Times or More (2003) and Aw Come Aw Wry (2005). As beginner's steps go, they're bold moves. They feel like opening chapters of an epic story.

With Pride (2007), the light on the horizon changes and the story takes a different twist. A new darkness sets in. The colours that infused the first two records have drained away. So is the youthful exuberance, replaced by a more meditative, restrained tone. The songs are stark, the arrangements sparse. The marching bands of before have made way for a makeshift choir, whose twilight howls and plaintive cries haunt the proceedings.

Houck was born in Alabama, and his music always had distinctly Southern- sounding foundations. But his willingness to experiment led him back on the road for the recording of Pride, with New York as his destination. The meditative, almost prayerful songs are anguished hymns to a love lost. His delivery is achingly tender.

Houck recorded everything himself, and it’s impossible to escape the feeling of abject loneliness that flows through the record. There’s catharsis at work here. Houck took his dark night of the soul and turned it into warm, incandescent light for us to bask in.