A song such as The Ghost Of The Girl In The Well from Paper Covers in 2009 established that Willard Grant Conspiracy (WGC) were no strangers to poltergeists but Ghost Republic now takes the haunting to a whole new level.
Their first album of all new material since 2008's Pilgrim Road is a musical wake for the symbolic death of an entire community in the once thriving mining town of Bodie CA, high in the Sierra Mountains.
The subject initially inspired a book conceived and organised by California based poet Nicelle Davis containing "a hallucinatory group of collaborative poems".
To follow this up, she called upon WGC to write a score to a film about what had become a ghost town. Davis knew that Robert Fisher could be counted on not to find any silver lining in this story.
Fisher's dour baritone voice and bleak world view has been a constant for a band that in previous incarnations has numbered up to thirty musicians. For this project, however, WGC numbers just two: Fisher and long-standing collaborator David Michael Curry on viola.
Written and recorded in Massachusetts, it is a forty minute long lament described as "a waltz between real and imagined worlds"; a mix of sorrowful songs and mournful instrumentals.
The discovery of a nest of rattlesnakes under the bed in Rattle And Hiss is a reminder of how our mortality always hangs in the balance and reinforces the theme of death and loss that dominates the album.
For The Only Child, we are introduced to the character of Mary ("not so contrary") whose mind is filled with spirits and who dreams of angels as if daring, or willing, the grim reaper to come to give release.
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In a similar vein is a song to the memory of the recently departed Perry Wallis plus the sobering ' we are here and then we are gone' refrain of Incident At Mono Lake.
Imagined memories of the living and dead are couched in melancholy, poetic terms as in Ghost Republic, the title track, in which the narrator's voice (Mary again?) intones: "when I think of you, I see the bow and arch of tendons".
Willard Grant Conspiracy call themselves an Americana garage folk band but this label doesn't really make much sense when the music is as downbeat as this,
Only the blasts of fierce electric guitar on instrumental tracks like The Early Hour or the one minute New Year's Eve seem to release any pent up emotions.
The key track is Oh We Wait, a lament of dry-eyed grieving which closes the album with the repeated line: Oh we wait and the tears won't come".
And it's a song which highlights the fundamental flaw of the record. Despite the sadness of the subject in hand, the album seems to be driven by neither grief nor rage. If it doesn't make them want to cry or shout out in anger, why should we?
Willard Grant Conspiracy's website
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