I think I read some time ago that the most frequently reoccurring nightmare involves a mysterious man with a hat relentlessly approaching paralysed sleeping victims. I’m not entirely sure why, mine involves College Math's Exams and Arnold the Village Scarecrow coming to life and chasing me through the sweetcorn fields – although thankfully not all at the same time.
I have no idea whether that’s relevant to the new track ‘Borrowed Time’ from Swedish musician Armadillo King, but certainly he has the vision of a mystery hat man pretty well defined, although the character he likes to portray is more of a lost soul than the Freddie Kruger style hat wearer that possibly results in all the nightmares.
He’s been explaining more about the whole ‘hat / wandering about’ thing:
“My songs are usually based around a character/alter ego. I often picture a man, a bit out of place and lost in time. He wears a hat as he travels from place to place, sometimes trying to find somewhere he belongs and sometimes maybe just trying to get away."
Maybe think of a time travelled David Livingstone curiously shuffling up Margate high street bemused at the number of take-away and charity shops.
Musically new song ‘Borrowed Time’ intrigues me as it opens with a gothic indie feel, that fits in well with the ethos of the storyline in the video, but then opens up quite attractively with a mix of Americana and Psych influenced styles, whilst melodically in the chorus it has more than a hint of REM. Michael Stipe meets Andrew Eldritch? It’s not a bad combination at all, although Eldritch wasn’t the hat wearing goth, that was more Wayne Hussey or maybe the flour covered chap from The Nephilim.
Anyway I really like this and Armadillo King has released another track in English this year called ‘Grave of Fools’ which is also definitely worth checking out. I’m going to take a wild guess that he won’t be releasing too many cheery ‘frolicking in the summer meadow’ type songs.
Previous to this he’s been mostly releasing songs in Swedish and I need to track them down, because he’s a really good songwriter.