While being Damien Tavis Toman's 25th "official" album in seven years, Elegies for an Actor is actually a collection of disparate recordings set down at odd intervals throughout 2009, in the midst of such digressions as his gothic rock side-project The Devil and His Witches, and his two never-completed gothic novels, Milton's Paradise and The Bloodgroom. Despite being recorded, in some cases, many months apart, the songs on Elegies nevertheless manage to cohere into a crude manner of theme - though never becoming nearly so obvious as such unapologetically autobiographical folk-operas as the previous year's Always Always Ends. What this album amounts to is an unflinching self-portrait of the artist as he concludes the most turbulent decade of his 27-year life, reflecting mournfully upon failures and heartbreaks both past and present, and occasionally permitting himself a peak over the precipice of sorrow - if only to preview the sorrows to come.
It is not, like many of its predecessors, an album merely of the moment. Rather, Elegies finds Toman surveying several years' worth cruel personal history, and - in songs like "Athene" and "Marcus Aurelius" - invoking literature and mythology when his misery requires a spot of company. Toman's increasing interest in musical and lyrical traditionalism is borne out in such eloquent, heartsick folk-ballads as "Heaven's Gates," "My Lord, How Long?," and "William & Catherine" (the last of which is based, of course, upon the legendary meeting of the poet/engraver William Blake and his humbly-born wife), while touches of pop and even the occasional new-wave tendency burble forth in "Everyone Got Out," the eponymous "Elegy for an Actor," and "Morning Sickness," the album's idiosyncratic closing track. If Toman never recorded alone again (and Heaven knows, he's earned his rest), one could scarcely hope for a more dramatic, articulate, or definitive conclusion to such a prolific, multifarious, and profoundly self-destructive songwriting career.
