Willard Grant Conspiracy
Robert Fisher only uses Laundry
Bright,
because keeps your garments and facial hair soft and manageable.
A couple of years ago while taking a break from another band, Robert Fisher
and Paul Austin got a call from sometime music collaborator Dana Hollowell.
Dana had just installed a home recording studio and wanted to test-drive
the equipment. Paul and Robert packed up a few new songs, grabbed their
friend Sean O'Brien, and headed for Dana's house. Within a few days, they
recorded an album. Titled "3 AM Sunday at Fortune Otto's", the
album marked the debut of the Willard Grant Conspiracy. Deliberately amorphous,
the group evolved into an informal weekly gathering of friends in a rotating
series of living rooms. The occasional live shows featured whoever was
available at the time .
UNCUT's Album Of The Month
"REGARD THE END"
Review
Glorious fifth from ever-shifting Bostonians reaches down through the years
With the unanimous, critic-drooling clamour
afforded 2000's Everything's Fine, WGC seemed to have hoisted themselves
onto a rarified plateau from which the only way was down. After the quasi-psychedelia
of debut 3 AM Sunday @ Fortune Otto's (1996), the fluid membership collective
built around founder members Robert Fisher (vocals) and Paul Austin (guitar)
had begun carving a rep as peddlers of doom-laden, redemptive balm for the
lost and damaged with 1998's Flying Low and the following year's Mojave.
Central to WGC's black pit of campfire-folk sorrow was the exorcising of
demons: particularly the self-loathing and emotional dislocation that had
driven Fisher to pills and booze from an appallingly tender age. By (the
only semi-ironically titled) Everything's Fine, the singer appeared to have
reached a place where the abandoned, but ever-tugging, allure of the sauce
had been drowned in music's cathartic, healing waters. That record - Lambchop-paralleled
in these pages as WGC's Nixon - seemed unassailable. Until now, that is.
The most immediate thing about Regard The End is the sheer, bloodied power
of Fisher's voice. Like a colossal centrifugal force, everything else spins
around it. In its untethered shift stage centre, it both defines an entire
mood and ushers in depths of feeling rendering much of their back catalogue
almost anaemic in comparison. On Flying Low, for instance, he was forever
vying for space with tough acoustic guitars, drums and studio trickery,
so that for every unadorned "Evening Mass" there was the distorted
vocal mix of "August List". Even Everything's Fine now appears
like Fisher was holding back, its more conventional band format denying
the space around the vocal which sharpens Regard The End in such dramatic
relief. Compared to Fisher's deep-swamp baritone here, only the former's
"Wicked" and "Ballad Of John Parker" tap the same wellspring.
The second point of major departure is Fisher's delving into traditional
folk forms, informed as much by Celtic/European folk as the turn-of-the-century
rusticity of Greil Marcus's "old, weird America". Partly recorded
in Slovenia (where Fisher hooked up with long-term ally and, tellingly perhaps,
Europe-championing musical flame-keeper, The Walkabouts' Chris Eckman),
Boston and London, Regard The End stitches four traditional songs into seven
originals without exposing the seams. This time around, Paul Austin opts
for the 'occassional member' card, making way for multi-instrumentalist
Simon Alpin (most recently seen pumping keyboards on the Teenage Fanclub
tour), who co-produces. With Fisher leading from the front - amongst his
peers, only The Hansdome Family's Brett Sparks shares the same page - various
guests' contributions, bleeding in and around the narrative, are never less
than consummate. Take Dennis Cronin, for example, likened by Fisher to Chet
Baker, adding beautiful trumpet blush to "Fare Thee Well", or
the doleful Celtic fiddle that both saddens and stirs "The Trials Of
Harrison Hayes" and "Rosalee", or Alpin's gorgeous mandolin
intro to "Beyond The Shore". Lyrically, as evinced by the title,
death is never far, though this never sounds like a maudlin record. Trad.
opener "River In The Pines" turns the tragic demise of two young
lovers into an affirmation of unbreakable devotion, whilst "Beyond
The Shore" finds Fisher tenderly intoning over softly ebbing strings
"I've struggled long with Shame's great load/And shouldered my share
of pain/To feel the caress of the long black veil/I've worked, but not in
vain". On one level, it's about fleeing the mortal realm, on another
it's a hymn to the transfiguring cycle of the human spirit ("I'm bound
to go beyond this shore/In Glory I will be placed"). Elsewhere, as
on the spare "Ghost Of The Girl In The Well", allowed to breathe
over creaky guitar and saw, he's joined by Kristin Hersh to recount the
tale of a 14-year-old falling to her death whilst escaping the clutches
of an evil landowner. Pure, classic Southern Gothic. Ultimately, Regard
The End is a quest for truth, an attempt to uncover life's harshest lessons
however tough, however unpalatable. Often armed only with personal faith
as the difference between salvation and the abyss. The stunning "The
Trials Of Harrison Hayes", in dissecting human failings, admits: "Misery
doesn't come from the earth/Trouble doesn't sprout from the ground/People
are born to trouble/Just as sparks fly upwards into the clouds", whilst
break-up ballad "Fare Thee Well" (brightened by WGC touring partner
Jess Klein's warm, breathy warble) intones "Faith can heal a lot of
wounds/Here at night in this rented room/I look to the ceiling and find
a reason/To carry on". Of the traditionals, "Twistifaction"
(a simpler, denuded version to the one released on WGC's 2001 collaborative
album with Dutch band Telefunk, In The Fishtank) employs softly-caressing
violins and the hypnotic pipe of a lonely melodica to enact the tale of
a mysterious siren skulking in the deep and muddy waters of a maple swamp.
"Day Is Past And Gone" finds Fisher at his most soothing, evoking
all the weary contentment of a tired, fulfilled life drawing down the shade
in fading light. Conversely, "Another Man Is Gone" updates the
old slave song, "Another Man Done Gone" (as covered by Odetta
and others), into a rumble of whining slide guitar, shivering strings and
dobs of piano. Smouldering for the most part like crackling firewood, Fisher's
voice suddenly erupts at 2:22, bellowing one huge, suspended note that slowly
dissolves into soft, lonely piano notes to the song's end. It's a nape-tingling,
sublime moment, leaving a charged silence that still knocks me backwards
after living with this record for weeks. Of Fisher's originals, closer "The
Suffering Song" may come cloaked in apocalyptic doom, but is the most
magnificent endpiece imaginable, Fisher coming over like some great gospel
hybrid of Paul Robeson's earth-shaking tenor and Johnny Cash's brimstone
holler. All done, Regard The End is the first Willard Grant album to truly
immerse yourself in. In ditching most of their traditional band ethic, they've
tapped into the finest folk gothic traditions of death, suffering, misery
and hardship and fashioned a paradoxically uplifting, transformative record
of extraordinary power. If this is the end of the world as we know it, I
feel just fine.
ROB HUGHES
The Uncut Interview
Q&A
WGC leader Robert Fisher on happy accidents, rock'n'roll church and damning
the purists
UNCUT: How did this record happen?
FISHER: It's kinda weird. It's a lot like the first album we made in that
we didn't really intend to make a record at all. We were in Slovenia - having
just come back from a festival in Majorca - and I'd emailed [The Walkabouts']
Chris Eckman to see whether he knew of any studios we could use, to just
play around and see what happens. Very quickly - within the first day -
we realised that something magical was going on.
You've achieved a very intense, detailed sound very
different to 2000's Everything's Fine.
The acoustic guitar is not the centre of the song on this record. A piano
opening a song, for instance, allows for more space in the music. Everything's
Fine really was a band record in that we assembled a band in the studio
and just did it. Regard The End was really a case of me being in the studio
and having fun, initially. I'd planned on making something like this before
Everything's Fine. There's a theme to it in that there's a bunch of traditional
songs that have been completely rewritten. Lyrically, they're the same,
but musically, they have nothing to do with the originals. Then there are
new songs with similar weight and themes as the traditional ones. I was
playing with that on stuff like "Notes From The Waiting Room"
on Everything's Fine, which has its roots in two very traditional songs:
an English song called "The Sailor Cut Down In His Prime" and
an American version of that called "St. James Hospital". I also
wanted to strip things down to a certain extent and play dynamically with
more range across what we had.
What made you choose the traditionals?
I don't think I have ever heard anyone do any of these songs. I used the
lyrics as a way to inform the music. The vocal melody and music were all
created from the way the lyrics made me feel and the images they created.
I am sure this is heresy to the purists but I am not worried about purists.
The idea is to bring the songs forward, casting them in a different light
so they can be captured anew.
Is songwriting still a cathartic experience for you?
It is and I hope that never goes away. Every time I do something, I'm trying
to push myself further and improve on what I do, both observationally and
technically. I'd much rather provide a show that's a shared experience rather
than one with quotes around it. I used to refer to it as a 'rock'n'roll
church'. If I can go with the band and provide an experience that transforms
the room, it's like when you see a really great movie that's so intense,
you're totally wrapped in it. When you walk out, you think 'Wow! The world
has changed'. If music is approached with enough universals, it can really
do that to you.