This has got to be seen as an incredibly brave record, or I guess foolish depending on your perspective.
When previous album Post To Wire emerged so many of us were taken by surprise not only by its greatness but by the fact that it was the 5th album by a band that hardly anyone was aware of. Quickly established as a band to be reckoned with, we all delved hungrily into their back catalogue while looking forward to their next release.
So here it is, a sparse, stripped bare set of songs that I can only imagine appealing to those already fans of the band (and at the risk of sounding too negative may actually be in danger of putting some off). It has already received comparisons to Springsteen’s Nebraska but really, this is bleak enough to make that other album sound like a McFly Greatest Hits collection. But that’s not to say that this isn’t a magnificent album in its own right.
Gone is Paul Brainard’s pedal-steel (last seen accompanying The Sadies) and the intense electric guitars that helped create layers of tension and drama. Instead, Willy Vlautin’s heartbreaking vocals are largely accompanied by acoustic guitars and a splattering of other instruments (bass, drums, piano, violin, accordion) and various sound effects.
Listening through the album is similar to flicking open the pages of a short story collection and reading intriguing snippets of story and characters. The words that Vlautin chooses to relate his songs are very ‘literary’ (in fact he is about to become a published author) but his delivery is painfully personal and intimate, so much so that if you, for a mere second, forget that these are fictionalised tales, there is an uncomfortable feeling of pointless, insensitive voyeurism.
Both ‘Disappeared’ and ‘The Janitor’ are prime examples of this, the former relating the desperation of a cuckolded lover tormented by visions of “them wrapped together as fire and smoke that would never fade”, lost in their intimacy as “he disappeared into heartache”. ‘The Janitor’ tells its own tale of despair and hopelessness as a hospital janitor falls in love with a female patient, beaten near to death by her spouse, escaping together to a safety that is short lived as her internal injuries cause her to cough up blood. The hopelessness is couched in the fear of returning to the hospital and the dangers that would bring until finally “Save my life she said / he grabbed her by her hand and said / that’s all I ever wanted to do / I just want to be with you / all I want to be is with you”. I defy anyone not to feel incredibly moved and yet also feel some discomfort.
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The great skill to this album though is the way in which the limited instrumentation is brought together to provide perfect settings for Vlautin’s voice and words. ‘Welhorn Yards’ frames its tale of hiding out, with the ghostly sound of wind and the quiet jangling of empty bottles, “Black Road”, wraps its disturbed dreams in crashing guitar chords, and the reminiscence of a father and son camping trip in “The Incident At Conklin Creek’ has sweet guitar and piano that defy the macabre discovery of a dead body “covered in dirt and gravel / the only thing showing were the feet”.
So, as brave and disturbing as any album I think I’ve ever heard, beautifully crafted, thoughtfully constructed, totally engrossing, challenging, harrowing, uncomfortable but so hard to look away from. Others merely flirt with the darker side of life in their songs, Willy Vlautin, in his, has courted, married and had children with it.
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