Despite Mat Cothran, aka lo-fi one-man band Coma Cinema, offering two albums for free from his website, I had never really sat down and listened to them. It has taken the announcement of a new album, titled Blue Suicide, and a couple of advance tracks to make me prick up my ears and then go back and find out just what I had missed out on.

It was latest advance track Hell that got me to sit up and take notice. It’s short at 80 seconds long, but not a moment is wasted and it is a wonderfully aching and melancholic snapshot of genuine heartbreak.

So I listened to the preceding track, Business As Usual, and once again was struck by the lyrical skills of one so young and the more driven, swelling backdrop, so I gave the previous album Stoned Alone a proper chance.

It is a beauty, a mix of rambling, mumbling folk, lo-fi picking, sparse, hypnotic rhythms, and lyrical couplets that turn a handful of these tracks from songs into mini-masterpieces.

Check out the brilliant plucked acoustics of Have You? and the much more desperate Blissed. And watch the video for the latter too – astonishing.

Visit his website here to get the first two albums for free. Check Wonderbeardtapes for details of the new album’s release in 2011.

Download Coma Cinema – Blissed mp3 (from Stoned Alone)

Download Coma Cinema – Have You? mp3 (from Stoned Alone)

Download Coma Cinema – Business As Usual mp3 (from Blue Suicide)

Download Coma Cinema – Hell mp3 (from Blue Suicide)