Willy Vlautin – The Left and The Lucky – Book Review

 Review for www.nomoreworkhorse.com 

An Evening with Willy Vlautin – The Sugar Club – Review

 Review for www.nomoreworkhorse.com 

Willy Vlautin – The Horse – Book Review

https://nomoreworkhorse.com/2024/05/07/willy-vlautin-the-horse-book-review/ Review for www.nomoreworkhorse.com 

Willy Vlautin – The Night Always Comes – Book Review

 Review for www.nomoreworkhorse.com 

Lean on Pete – Film Review

Review for www.nomoreworkhorse.com

https://nomoreworkhorse.com/2018/05/01/lean-on-pete-film-review/

Richmond Fontaine – The Workman’s Club – 29-04-16 – Live Review

Review for www.nomorewokhorse.com

https://nomoreworkhorse.com/2016/05/01/richmond-fontaine-the-workmans-club-29-04-16-live-review/

Richmond Fontaine – You Can’t Go Back If There’s Nothing To Go Back To – Album Review

Review for www.nomoreworkhorse.com

http://nomoreworkhorse.com/2016/03/25/richmond-fontaine-you-cant-go-back-if-theres-nothing-to-go-back-to-album-review/

Album Review: The Delines | Colfax

Review for www.meg.ie

http://www.meg.ie/the-delines-colfax/

Album Review: Richmond Fontaine – Thirteen Cities

2005’s The Fitzgerald was a highly accomplished, reductive masterpiece yet could have been something of a creative cul-de-sac.  So for 2007’s Thirteen Cities they enlisted the help of Calexico, Howe Gelb and brought Paul Brainard’s steel guitar from out of purgatory to produce a more widescreen sound.  The album is something of a concept album, on the subject of Thirteen Cities, but Willy Vlautin’s downbeat writing is as bleak as ever.

Musically, the palette is widened to include trumpets, and after moody scene setter Intro/The Border, these trumpets clash spectacularly with Vlautin’s croaky vocals, like Richmond Fontexico, and the track fails.  Thankfully the rest of the album is way better.  $87 and a Guilty Conscience That Gets Worse The Longer I Go is a gentle, moody song with a slight alt-country feel.  In a similar, pleasant vein are Westward Ho and Capsized.  There are downbeat classics aplenty here, from the restless strum of I Fell Into Painting Houses In Phoenix, Arizona to the mournful trumpets of The Kid from Belmont Street.

Some of the most evocative tracks here are instrumentals, El Tiradito and Ballad of Dan Fanta conjure up lonesome prairie scenes.  Other tracks are very sparse, such as the almost spoken St Ides, Parked Cars, And Other Peoples Homes, harrowing tale The Disappearance of Ray Norton and the tinkling, cast-adrift piano of Lost In This World.  The fullest band performance here is on penultimate track Four Walls, which could have come off Winnemucca or Post to Wire.

It’s not Richmond Fontaine’s best collection of songs but it’s a pretty representative album, if slightly more ‘Americana’ than usual.

Album Review: Richmond Fontaine – The Fitzgerald

After the critical success of Post to Wire, Richmond Fontaine took a typically idiosyncratic step for 1995’s follow-up The Fitzgerald.  They stripped out most of the elements that contributed to Post to Wire’s success.  So gone are all the uptempo songs, most of the electric guitars and above all, Paul Brainard’s steel guitar. 

Replacing these is a series of stripped down, spare songs, which are almost all bleak as f**k.  Second track, The Welhorn Yards is a prime example of this, a beautiful melody picked out by a bone-dry guitar and Willy Vlautin’s harrowing lyrical imagery “I fell into the uneasiest of sleeps, the worst nightmares of sleeps.  A madman came after me, his hair was on fire, his eyes were bleeding and he said he was gonna kill me.”  Amazingly this isn’t merely a depressing song, but a pared-down gem.

It’s followed by the slightly more propulsive, though no less bleak Black Road, a desperate tale of “the alcoholics and the ruined and the framed”, and some highly effective backing vocals.  It’s difficult for the band to maintain this level of intensity over the whole album, though they make a fair fist of it on the piano-enhanced The Incident at Conklin Creek.  In the main, guitars are plucked rather than strummed, drums are brushed rather than beaten.

If anything can be called upbeat here, it’s two tracks, the Tex-Mex strum of Exit 194B and nervous strums of Don’t Look and It Won’t Hurt, the latter reminiscent of some of the material on Winnemucca.  At times the sparseness of the material shows up some of the band’s failings, such as Vlautin’s vocals (on Laramie, Wyoming) and some underwritten songs (The Janitor).

But these are minor complaints.  This album is about telling a story and creating a mood, and dealing with that.  The whole thing is brought together by the final track, the gorgeously sparse three minutes of Making It Back.  It’s Willy Vlautin alone with his guitar and bottles at 3am with only the Pogues to keep him company (“Summer in Siam plays on repeat again, we never get sick of it”).  Alone that is, except for his love (“now that I’m in your arms again… there’s no one else I can talk to”).  The track finishes with a beautifully picked guitar coda, almost reminiscent of The Smiths’ Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want.

After the track finishes we’re left with only silence.  There’s nothing more can be said.

Album Review: Richmond Fontaine – Lost Son

Richmond Fontaine’s third album Lost Son, released in 1999, is one of their bleakest works.  There is no frivolity here, the music rages and rages through tracks like Saviour of Time, Ft. Lewis and Mule.  The band come on much less like a country band, and much more like a speed-punk band.  Guitars are pummelled, drums are pounded and Willy Vlautin clings on for dear life, telling his bleak stories.

It’s an easier listen when the music calms down a notch or two on Cascade, and on Contrails and later Four Hours Out we even get steel guitar from Paul Brainard.  Girl In A House In Felony Flats is dirge-like, crawling along on guttural guitars, yet it’s strangely compelling.  However few of the tunes are overly engaging.

Finally we get the devastating Hope & Repair, which manages to take the story into an even darker place, where a man takes in a prostitute only to see the whole thing end in blood and complete despair.

It’s exhausting to listen to and unremittingly bleak, not an ideal starting point for this band.

Album Review: Richmond Fontaine - Miles From

Richmond Fontaine’s second album, released in 1997 has fewer distinct tracks than their debut, and a more pronounced country feel, with the addition of Paul Brainard’s steel guitar.

Opening track Trembling Leaves is a midtempo electric strum in the vein of the material on Safety, while Give Me Time is an optimistic sounding tune. You can hear early signs of how the band would develop on albums like Post to Wire on this one, with Willy Vlautin’s odd chorus of “give me boiler makers, give me time.”

The title track is a somewhat darker, brooding affair but in truth none of the lyrics indicate that the protagonists are having anything other than a rough time. Instrumental Grandview comes as something of a relief, and a pause for breath, giving Brainard’s wonderfully evocative steel guitar a chance to take centre stage.

Elsewhere, the hesitant Collapse stops and starts uneasily before the mood is lightened with the breezy Lemonheads-style Calm. Later tracks like Blinding Sight, White Out and Concussion are a little indistinguishable from each other, though the latter features some fine six-string abuse.

Not sure how this one stands up with Richmond Fontaine’s later albums.

Album Review: Richmond Fontaine – Safety

Richmond Fontaine’s debut album Safety, released in 1996, shows some early promise, which they realized more fully on later work. Listening to it now, it’s not a million miles away from the likes of Whiskeytown.

Opening track Dayton, Ohio is akin to a ramshackle Lemonheads, as are the midtempo strums of Novocaine and Wagonwheel Motel. There are some 100 mile an hour tracks like Harold’s Club, Riverhouse and 1968, which have plenty of punky energy but don’t suit Willy Vlautin and co so well.

They are better when they slow things down, on the acoustic Settle and Safety. White Line Fever is again reminiscent of Whiskeytown, while the aforementioned Novocaine is a fine strum with the refrain of “17 reasons that I can’t explain.”

Later the 96 second Kid Steps Out Into The Road takes a bleak subject matter where this kid “duct-tapes 3 M-80s to his head and lights them” and combines it with a jaunty melody with a wonderful banjo part, concluding that “it’s the luck of the Irish in Reno, Nevada.”

All in all it’s a decent debut, with signs of what the band would become on future albums.

Concert Review: Richmond Fontaine at the Workmans Club, Dublin

Review for www.meg.ie

Album Review: Richmond Fontaine - The High Country

Review for www.meg.ie

Album Review: Richmond Fontaine – Post To Wire

Something of a critical, if not commercial breakthrough for Richmond Fontaine, 2004’s Post To Wire certainly made impact in the glossy music monthlies. And with good reason too – it’s probably the most melodic of their albums.

After The Longer You Wait which sets the tone, second track, Barely Losing has a gorgeous guitar and piano combination, topped off by the pleasing groans of Willy Vlautin (“we’re walking on the railroad tracks at 5 in the morning).

Montgomery Park takes a different approach, it’s a ragged, bat out of hell rocker, yet still melodic amid the raging guitars. The songs are punctuated by spoken-word interludes detailing the trials and tribulations of the protagonist Walter, a troublemaker by the sounds of this.

But the real strength of this album is the number of strong tunes contained within. Through and Two Broken Hearts are classic sounding midtempo country-rockers. However, the album is never allowed to get too comfortable before the darkness returns in the towering tale of a siege in Hallway.

Deborah Kelly provides a fine duet on the title track, another bright country-rock tune, and also on the more downbeat Polaroid of the girl looking for her dad who “don’t know where he lives anymore.”

Penultimate track Willamette sees the band unleash their full power as Vlautin rages at a missing brother, referencing their dreams by the aforementioned river. It’s a huge sounding cathartic track, all pounding drums, snarling guitars and an incongruous steel guitar, which miraculously fits into the mix.

The album is a perfect starting point for Richmond Fontaine.

Album Review: Richmond Fontaine – Winnemucca

Richmond Fontaine’s fourth album, released in 2002, is an altogether less frantic affair than its predecessor, the damaged Lost Son. From the opening track, Winner’s Casino, the feeling is fairly relaxed and very country-rock, thanks to Paul Brainard’s prominent pedal steel guitar. Out of State emerges from the murk of the previous track with a brightly, picked guitar over Willy Vlautin’s miserable lyrics (“shut the curtains, put a blanket over them…. no one knows where we are, we could stay like this for days”).

Northline (which also became the title of Vlautin’s second, exceptional novel) is an anthemic lament of a girl whose “letters turned to postcards and then never appeared”. The band change tack later with two instrumentals back-to-back, the country-rocking Twyla and the atonal, ambient and atmospheric Patty’s Retreat, which acts as a musical dust settling before the second half of the album.

The optimism of the music contrasts directly with the heavily downbeat lyrics, particularly on final two tracks Five Degrees Below Zero, possibly the cheeriest thing on the album. Western Skyline offers a little hope, like a new dawn “where golden light shines down upon everything”.

Vlautin is a great writer but not a particularly strong singer, however his band provide an empathetic backing.

Album Review: Richmond Fontaine - We Used to Think The Freeway Sounded Like A River

Richmond Fontaine are a sort of "alt-country" band and have been going since the mid 90s. Largely the vision of singer, frontman and main songwriter Willy Vlautin, they have 7 previous albums under the belt. Vlautin ia also a published author and his songs, like his accomplished novels, are largely downbeat, focusing on drifters, deadbeats and losers trying to find their way out of desperate situations.

Vlautin's voice can grate a bit and some of the overtly country songs I can take or leave. One of the main problems with some Richmond Fontaine songs is they work well as stories but feel forced into songs with the music grafted on. Vlautin is, however, an excellent story-teller (his 2nd novel, Northline is a must-read).

This album opens with the title track, a gentle song, very relaxed where he depicts a crummy lifestyle, where they lived next to an abandoned house with a broken pool full of shopping carts, and they pretended it was their swimming pool. After a short instrumental (Northwest), there follows one of their more upbeat songs, You Can Move Back Here, which sounds a little like REM. This is followed by the unsettling The Boyfriends, where the protagonists realises his new girl has a child, and he imagines how the kids feel, all to the accompaniment of a sad mariachi trumpet.

The Pull is an another sad story delivered over relatively quiet backing, and is followed by a barely audible instrumental. Maybe We Were Both Born Blue is, despite the title, one of the more upbeat numbers with a kind of wistful countryish backing. Watch Out is another quiet song, consisting mainly of Vlautin whispering 'watch out' but the next track 43 is more intense, possibly the most intense on the album.

Lonnie is as close as they have come yet to mainstream rock, while towards the end of the album Two Alone is another intense moment, with a simple but driving melody. The final track, A Letter to the Patron Saint of Nurses (great title) is a spoken word piece over a quiet backing which is surprisingly effective.

Overall this won't convert anyone, but is a good addition for fans of their music.