plorentz's Full Review: Let It Roll by Willard Grant Conspiracy
The latest album by the Gothic Americana collective known as the Willard Grant Conspiracy opens with a doomed piano ballad, a few sad verses compiling the presumably final observations of a soldier overseas - in a moment where the greater, abstract purposes of a war are reduced to something as trivial and meaningless and human as taking a stand of trees. It's a dark moment of solitude - the kind of moment that the group's mastermind, singer-songwriter Robert Fisher, has proven himself a master of over the course of a decade, several studio albums, and hundreds of live shows - which immediately calls to mind the souls patrolling streets of bombed out cities in Iraq and Afghanistan; but also, by its vague (but distinctly non-Middle Eastern sounding) geographical references, the song, called "From a Distant Shore", seems to specifically avoid a literal allusion to those wars, suggesting a timelessness and placelessness to that dark moment, and linking it with an infinite number of like moments extending back through history to the very birth of warfare. That's not an overstatement. Robert Fisher can do that, and he does (again) on his latest record, titled Let It Roll, a title which seems to subvert the by-the-bootheels heroism suggested by a certain misappropriated 9/11 catchphrase with a kind of furious resignation.
Fisher isn't so much a singer-songwriter as he is a sort of conjurer, a medium for a nation of ghosts, or a doomsday prophet; and his songs seem to come not so much from his own imagination as from the collective memory of plants and birds and rocks and things, from an Oort Cloud of human (though primarily American) history. A man of imposing bulk and a deeply melancholic stage presence, his appealingly homely singing ranges from the alcoholic old-school vibrato croon of a flannel-clad barfly singing his favorite country songs along with a jukebox to a fiery roar of the apocalypse. Likewise, his songs can convey a strangely conversational charm and diary-entry intimacy just as easily as they can summon up a hundred dead legends and reassemble them in horrifically vivid, three-dimensional life, like Ezekiel in the valley of bones.
So that just as "From a Distant Shore" goes gently into its good night, the title track unleashes an obliterating duststorm of sound, a seismic torrent of dirty guitar roar, crumbling mountains of drums and wailing strings. For a full 9 minutes, we watch as the ground in front of us explodes and the world ends in slow motion, Fisher's grizzled voice the furious, wind-stolen admonitions of a modern day Moses barely audible above the din. "Let it Roll" is the sound of the doomed meeting their doom face to face. Completing the opening triptych is a sprawling seven-minute country waltz called "Dance With Me", whose pleadings, coming after the devastation of the title track, are impossibly sweet with a sort of futile beauty. The song seems endless in the most pleasurable way, unchanging, inert and infinite. And there may be nothing, either on this record, or on any other by the Willard Grant Conspiracy that matches the cumulative depth, scope and strength of those three songs together.
Which isn't to say that the rest of Let It Roll isn't worthwhile. In fact, it's probably the group's most accessible album so far, boasting a heavy, live rock band sound throughout, but with an enthrallingly orchestral sonic depth. Guitars, pianos, and drums dominate, but, in any given moment, you can hear unexcavated voices (courtesy of Madder Rose's Mary Lorson and the Dream Syndicate's Steve Wynn), viola parts, the sound of a man playing a saw and other things reflective of a distinctly Appalachian musical resourcefulness. "Flying Low" is an almost chipper specimen of earnest southern rock that the Drive-By Truckers' Patterson Hood would love to have written, and "Mary of the Angels" is one long, hypnotic sigh of prayer. On a cover of Bob Dylan's "Ballad of the Thin Man", Fisher batters his voice into a pulp of bloody red meat, bellowing each new verse (and so many verses) with renewed vehemence, and, by the end, an utter contempt for anything even vaguely resembling melody. The almost operatic escalation of bilious violence amounts to one of the best Dylan covers, like, ever.
The formula for a Willard Grant Conspiracy record - an unlikely fusion of darkest bluegrass, jangly folk, southern rock, chamber pop and punk nihilism - has remained largely unchanged since the band's debut in the mid-90s, meaning that once familiar with the band, you can be fairly confident in knowing what to expect from each record; but, on the other hand (and perhaps because the band's line-up is so fluid and varied) no Willard Grant Conspiracy record sounds quite the same - the only real constant being Fisher's earthy voice and its American Gothic aesthetic. Let It Roll is distinguished by its loose, noisy performances, and sprawling arrangements; and what seems to be a more raw "live" sounding set of vocals by Fisher, offering a more three-dimensional portrait of the artist as an idiosyncratic and uncompromising singer. This is probably not the band's best collection of songs, but in terms of performance, it's a brutalizing masterpiece.
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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:
"Let It Roll" by Willard Grant Conspiracy
Dahlia / Reincarnate Records
Released 2/27/07
Produced by Robert Fisher
62 min.
SONGS: From a Distant Shore - Let It Roll - Dance With Me - Skeleton - Flying Low - Breach - Crush - Mary of the Angels - Ballad of a Thin Man - Lady of the Snowline
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