When I was a kid my dad had a friend who was the tallest person I’d ever seen. The guy towered over me, a gaggle of limp limbs, elbows like loosely screwed hinges barely holding things together. As far as I knew, he was the tallest man on earth. Years later, I found out the dude was only like 6’2, and I was understandably disappointed—not that it was his fault for being only pretty tall rather than inhumanly gigantic. But he was also a rogue tattoo artist (tattooing had not yet been legalized in Massachusetts), and I thought was pretty cool. This kind of how I feel about The Tallest Man On Earth, the Swedish singer-songwriter most notable for sounding uncannily similar to Bob Dylan—a bit disappointing, but still pretty cool.

There was a good piece in last week’s New Yorker by Sasha Frere-Jones about revival acts, and how they must further the genre if they’re going to be successful. The Tallest Man On Earth’s new EP, Sometimes The Blues Is Just a Passing Bird, keeps running with the Dylan thing, but expands on it, adding an odd and hard to describe Swede blues, Devendra-Banhart-meets-Karen-Dalton feel to the whole thing that's almost—but not quite—there on his last full length, The Wild Hunt. You can download a free track from the EP over at his record label’s site.