The beautifully photographed album art gives a clue as to the atmosphere of Tex La Homa’s latest release Little Flashes Of Sunlight On A Cold Dark Sea. The title, however, says it all.
Tex La Homa is the side project of UK singer and multi-instrumentalist Matt Shaw. The name is taken from Canadian author Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel Generation X.
The first Tex La Homa album, Dazzle Me With Transience, arrived in 2002. It was a lo-fi, low frequency atmosphere that Matt created around haunting melodies, and understated electronic sounds. It was meshed together to produce a satisfying collection of largely chill out ballads.
The next album If Just Today Were To Be My Entire Life followed in 2003. It continued in the same dream pop territory to good effect. Now we have Little Flashes Of Sunlight On A Cold Dark Sea (Acuarela, 2008). For this album Matt abandons his electronic experimentation and instead has totally stripped everything down to produce an intensely personal set of lo-fi songs.
Matt plays every instrument heard on every piece of his music. This album is no exception with the majority of songs featuring Matt on acoustic guitar or piano. It is, in places, shockingly sparse, deep, bleak, and even dark. However, just like the album's title promises, the odd flash of sunlight does indeed break through.
The intimacy of the album is exposed from the opening track “The Unanswered Question”. Matt, who records alone in his room in Poole, Dorset, adopts a more simplistic approach than that displayed on his previous albums. The result is a mixture of melodic and melancholic material reduced down to the mere essence of the song itself.
Written around personal experiences, memories, reflections, and concerns the songs have everything stripped away to reveal only its core. It seems that Matt is inspired by the gray bleakness of the sea by which he has been surrounded for most of his life. It’s distant horizon, it’s gray and shifting mood, and its hidden power.
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