TOR07
It takes some cojones for a band to open their account with a sprawling double album, even if the trio concerned all have a good chunk of musical miles under the belt in varying identities, often together - a Venn Diagram of Benson, Gillen and Thompson’s output would see no small amount of cross-over.
However, The Dead West is a different beast to their previous works - this is self-consciously epic in tone, the scene set by the opening “Clouds Disperse” which takes up nearly a quarter of the first disc’s running time. Like James Brown on stage, it frequently threatens to grind to a halt before renewing it’s energies and staggering on that little bit further. Images of parched earth, lonesome roads and giant mesa outcrops are brought to mind in this track, a theme which is picked up lyrically in the subsequent “Kings Of The Road”, a near polar opposite musically (bright, airy, short) and one which draws together Kraftwerk and The Beach Boys at its end - a mash-up that in retrospect seems obvious, but has thus far been overlooked.
It is the America as romantic idyll, as home to imaginary characters that informs the majority of The Dead West, the final outpost for strangers with mysterious scars, strong and enigmatic women, the search for a new future and a place to bury the past. The fascinations are clear : the music, the cars, the landscape; a culture experienced through the books, songs and movies that celebrate the country. Perhaps the influences weigh too heavy at times, but even then they are shot through with a certain English sense of distance, a twinkling in the eyes (the title of the Talking Heads homage “Zen Fringe”, for example.)
Although there appears an over-arching theme on the album, musically it is a grab bag of genres with each of the trio bringing their own influences to the work. It is only to be expected, therefore, that The Dead West veers from one sound to another; the plaintive “Johnny Don’t Forget” - a song in search of a Phil Spector Wall Of Sound - sits next to the Fall-esque holler of “The Crying Sea”, which cranks the dials into the red as it staggers to a conclusion. It shouldn’t make sense, and yet, because of what has gone before, kind of does.
The Second volume is the calmer of the two and contains the less obvious songs, the ones that need more time to appreciate. There is a trade-off; the first volume has the majority of the whoopin’ and a-hollerin’ stompers, even if it does stagger around like a drunken mountain man, high on fermented berries. The second volume doesn’t grab the attention as much immediately and yet is the more consistent sounding work - it opens with two instrumentals before the relaxed, folky “All The Girls Are Called Beatrice” which sounds like it could go on and on around its circular chord sequence…and pretty much does. The John Fahey influence makes an appearance in several places and then after the surprisingly jaunty “River Run” the trio give it some experimentation with the abstract closing radio experiments of “Woodsong/Hellsong” and the bluesy “Down The River”.
It could perhaps be argued that with a little judicious editing The Dead West could lose a couple of tracks and fit the whole shebang on one disc; but that suggestion flies in the face of the whole notion behind this double album; this is a place to go out on a limb, to try something a little different. Perhaps the writers’ influences don’t sit as comfortably side by side as they thought. Perhaps, at times, it smacks of a chaotically mix of tracks offers something for everyone (liking every track is probably limited to the band themselves); as an introduction to the Treehouse Orchestra, it could double up as a virtual label sampler. As sprawling double debuts go, it’s definitely a strong contender; in fact, it is so comprehensive an expression of The Dead West’s sound that one wonders where they can go next - a shambolic three volume set perhaps? - Review by Jeremy Bye
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