Willy Vlautin - The Motel Life

More Stoytelling

I've just finished reading Vlautin's debut novel The Motel Life having been totally wrapped up in its painful and compassionate story for the last few days. I think this is a stronger book than his second Northline which I also reviewed recently, but that is neither here nor there; they are both excellent. This too concerns itself with damage and repair. It is a story about two brothers Frank and Jerry Lee and how their love and support for one another holds up in the wake of a tragic accident. It seems the world of Vlautin's stories and musical narratives are primarily about how life tests us all, and in The Motel Life, Frank in particular is tested throughout by circumstance as well as the prevalent cold and snow of the winter.

Ordinary people, a strong sense of place, and realistic dialogue provide the basis for Vlautin's storytelling expertise. As with Northline where the occasional appearance of Paul Newman provides a separate narrative thread, in this story Frank is a consummate storyteller, and he is normally regaling his brother Jerry Lee with tall tales to get both of them through and past difficult moments. This escapism is always seen for what it is and enjoyed purely in the moment rather than as some kind of permanent palliative for a tough life: another layer in the convincing and candid realism.

I was reading this novel yesterday in a waiting room where another guy, Paul, turned up and recognised it was Vlautin and we spoke a little about his writing and music. What are the chances of someone else being so familiar with his work? Paul certainly knew a lot more than me about Vlautin's music with Richmond Fontaine and he too has his ticket to see them playing locally. He expressed his doubts about their latest The High Country which I fully understand [implied in my recent review and certainly reflected in others out there] and he reminded me of Post To Wire as a better example of Richmond Fontaine's music.

Richmond Fontaine - Post To Wire

I'm listening to this now as I write. The music is certainly more to the fore than the storytelling of The High Country, its country/americana tinges dominating. I'm not going to work through all the tracks [there are 16]. Three of these are postcards, spoken here by a persona called Walter who sends them back to his friend Pete to apologise for running out on the rent, pawning your TV and your folk's wedding rings and explain things about his troubled and damaged life. Track fourteen is fascinating as it is titled Allison Johnson, the female protagonist of Northline, and it is a song sung to her by a hopeful lover/partner and for those of us who know her so well we know this optimism is either a lie or simply naive. Opener The Longer You Wait is typical in its focus on storytelling, but the music does have parity of purpose on this album, here the distant pedal steel riding in and passing through the song like a slow train. Eleventh track Polaroid gives a powerful flavour of the literate narratives:

Everyone inside was half ruined and almost gone
Outside in the frozen parking lot
He held her in his arms
As he led her inside her glasses fogged from the cold and
They both stood there dressed in their best clothes
"Has anyone here seen my dad" the girl called
"Cause he hasn't been to work and I don't know
Where he lives anymore"

Not everyone lives their life alone
Not everyone gives up
Or is beaten or robbed or always stoned
Not everyone

The bartender bought them rounds
And made a toast and
With a Polaroid he took their picture and hung it
Up on the bar mirror all alone
And for a little while it was like
The whole world was alright like
No one was beaten or forsaken or had given up
When they'd just seen light 

Title track Post To Wire sums up the Vlautin pragmatism and preoccupation because I don't think it is as problematic as a philosophy: life is as it is and with any luck it will work out if we just accept it as it is

I don't care anymore who was right
And who was wrong and who was left and who was leaving
I'll overlook everything if you can overlook everything
I know you're worn out but you know I'm worn out too

Richmond Fontaine - Live, Exeter Phoenix 17th September, 2011 [Acoustica Weekend]

High Country Acoustica

I've been looking forward to this for a while, and it was an absolute joy to see Willy Vlautin and the band performing live last night. They were outstanding.

In the process of attending I realised what a RF groupie I am: I grabbed an armchair right at the front [a chair with arms, not like a livingroom lounger; at my age I hate standing and either lean against walls at concerts, get a seat if very lucky, or stand with pained legs - ahhhh], and at the end nabbed the set list and then went over to shake Vlautin's hand and thank him for such a great gig. Why not?

The band played most of The High Country and that in itself was fascinating. When I reviewed the album I did express wonder if it would be possible to deliver its storytelling and atmospheric rather than distinctive melodies live. The speculation is over, and to these ears the live performance actually enhanced the song cycle's immediacy and impact: Amy Boone from The Damnations TX performed the female persona - as well as other musical contributions throughout - and her physical presence and clear delivery brought that narrative alive for me [opener to album and performance Inventory was beautiful]. Indeed, I felt I 'heard' the narratives much more clearly in this live set, and not just because I had listened to the album, although the melodies too are now beginning to assert their individualities. The band performed 14 of the album's 17 tracks and it was perfectly gauged and played. The band was tight, and instrumentals an absolute knock-out: Wlly Vlautin, vocals and guitars; Dave Harding, bass and vocals; Sean Oldham, drums and vocals; Dan Eccles, electric guitar and steel; Amy Boone, as I've said, joining on vocals and keyboards. Eccles was on fine form and he wow wows his guitar with a bodily empathy.

My other favourites from the set list and additionals were Post To Wire and Polaroid, the latter sublime. They also rocked with a few punchy numbers and it is easy to get lost in Vlautin's narratives and forget what a consummate band they are. This is the first time I have seen them live and I am still exploring the albums so it's a brilliant journey begun - I also have Vlautin's third novel Lean on Pete yet to read. Paul Who Knows His Richmond Fontaine was there, and having introduced me to Post To Wire he has now introduced me to Winnemucca. I have listened once and will no doubt review later - there are some powerful instrumentals in addition to the stories - and an early favourite is Northline which became the title of Vlautin's second novel, and I am grateful for Paul's contribution to this wonderful discovering.

Willy Vlautin - Lean On Pete

Third Triumph

This third novel consolidates Vlautin's skill and significance as a contemporary writer and it also continues the stylistic American tradition of simple storytelling in terms of naturalistic dialogue and straightforward expression. The honest and believable first person narrative of 15 year old Charley Thompson provides the perfect vehicle for such simplicity, but of course whatever the techniques and personas and situations used, the depth of feeling and meaning is conveyed with an immediacy and emotive impact that is compelling.

Charley's story is similar in many respects to the themes and contexts of Vlautin's previous two novels: journey as escape and self-discovery; damaged lives; hardship [against the self, both physical and mental, but especially loss and death], and the kindnesses, indifferences and nastiness of humanity.

It isn't a significant difference, but I don't feel this story is either as bleak or as hopeful - Vlautin's potent novelistic paradox - as its predecessors. That isn't to say it is neutral. Charley's hardships are many and continue to come at him, but apart from two specific moments of violence he copes well [for his age] and we as readers are not made to dwell on these as Charley continues to move forward and beyond these quickly - though not in the physical reality of his trek across significant distances. Nor is it as thematically hopeful in as much as although Charley encounters many examples of kindness and support I don't feel the book ends with such a certain affirmation of this - though the reader is allowed to decide/imagine for themself.

The novel is rich in its ensemble of characters with more variety and range than in the previous two books. Charley is, as I've said, totally believable and he is also hugely likable in his vulnerability, work ethic, survival instinct and youthful exuberance.

Horses and horseracing are an interesting contextual reality for much of the story and Vlautin has clearly used his interest in and knowledge of this to provide yet more credible and engaging settings for the book. There is also a brilliant pattern of experiences - many shown quickly or even just recalled by Charley in reminiscences with others - which seem to tumble out of Vlautin's own actual experiences. That or it is just more from his rich and vivid imagination. It's a wonderfully 'easy' read and in many ways for me as rewarding from that simple experience as much as the heartfelt tale.

Willy Vlautine - Northline

Storyteller

I’ve just finished reading my signed copy of the short novel Northline by American author and front-man of band Richmond Fontaine, Willy Vlautin. It is a simple and yet powerful story of the damaged and self-damaging life of Allison Johnson, and it seems to me that as a male, Vlautin has empathised with and realised effectively in his narrative the female voice and perspective. There is simplicity in the telling of this everyday girl’s life that is typically American - though it isn’t Carveresque, for example, in that it isn’t pared back to that ordinariness – which is realised through the naturalistic dialogue and strong sense of place, essentially Las Vegas and Reno, as well as bars, beer parties and shopping malls.

The story is full of painful and violent episodes but the overriding theme is one of hope and endeavour, these latter positive attributes found in the kindnesses and support from various disparate people Allison meets on her escape to a better life.

There isn’t a distinctive literary style other than direct and simple narrative. There is the literary ruse, however, of Allison talking with her film hero and secret lover Paul Newman, someone who supports her most in times of need. At these times, the references to various characters and scenes from what appears to be most of his films sounds a little too contrived [apart from the fact he speaks to her!], but it does provide a narrative thread.

Most effective are the juxtapositions of Allison’s painful falls and optimistic retrievals. A particularly dramatic one is where Allison is raped – a situation she has in some ways fatalistically placed herself [though there is no authorial justification for the rape, and its brutal description speaks for itself] – and this is set two chapters later against Allison going for a telesales job and meeting Penny who is as ordinary and real as an average person can be and yet her plain speaking, encouragements and simple kindnesses provide, in the circumstances, a powerful alternative experience in a difficult life.

Richmond Fontaine - The High Country

This is by way of mentioning Richmond Fontaine’s tenth album The High Country which also tells a story of damaged lives and the pursuit of healing. The songstory tells of a mechanic and auto-parts counter sales girl who have painful histories and also a secret love that prompts them to escape the dark world in which they live.

It’s clear the high regard I have for Vlautin as a storyteller [and his first novel The Motel Life has just been made into a film starring Kris Kristofferson] and this album certainly conveys the dark atmosphere and pain – with some sardonic humour – of that love affair and life. And it is for this atmospheric telling that I would recommend the album: spoken word narratives, like opener Inventory, are mirrored by sparse but beautiful guitar melodies and there is often a captivating aural tension in the darkness of the words and the beauty of the instrumental.

Then there are the full songs, those that are the band Richmond Fontaine rather than an actor’s or actress’s voice, and these too have their narratives with introducing new characters and/or advancing the plot. But it can be hard to always follow the storyline, and as a listener I don’t think you are always sure if you should be concentrating on the story or the music. There is also the fact, for me, that there are no stand-out tunes, though there is the recurring and haunting melody that does accompany the spoken narratives. This isn’t a criticism, it’s just an acknowledgement that this album is working on both these levels and there is a compromise, though perhaps Vlautin would dispute that notion and see it more as a creative duality.

The storyline, by the way, is neatly outlined in the track listing so if you don’t want to know it before listening, look away now:

1. Inventory
2. The Girl On The Logging Road
3. The Chainsaw Sea
4. Let Me Dream Of The High Country
5. The Mechanic Falls In Love With The Girl
6. The Mechanic’s Life
7. Angus King Tries To Leave The House
8. The Meeting On The Logging Road
9. Claude Murray’s Breakdown
10. The Eagles Lodge
11. Driving Back To The Chainsaw Sea
12. Lost In The Trees
13. On A Spree
14. Deciding To Run
15. I Can See A Room
16. The Escape
17. Leaving

This isn’t a concept album and it isn’t trying to deliver a Tommy or similar! I think in the context of Vlautin as established and effective author, this is an interesting and entertaining element in his, and the band’s, gentle pushing of boundaries. I am naturally looking forward to the band playing in Exeter later this month and it will be interesting to see how this music is performed on stage and if it will be a significant advantage to know the story beforehand. I suspect that is the case [not that I will be able to know different] and this in itself is interesting in considering the history and purpose of telling a story because the minstrel’s tale should really be immediate?

Richmond Fontaine - You Can't Go Back If There's Nothing to Go Back To, album review

Never Better

In all our worlds, time advances inexorably – it is a simple law of nature – but in Vlautin’s and that inhabited by his many personas, that ‘progress’ forward is not as the cliché would have it, even if ironically, a move to betterment. Invariably, it is about dissolution, or at best, change: but it is never the same. As the album title tells us – and I am sure the line is directly or indirectly stated in many of Vlautin’s songs over the years with Richmond Fontaine and The Delines – you can’t go back. You can physically and therefore literally, but if you do, things will not be the same and they will most likely be worse, in most cases depressingly so.

Documenting such a harsh reality, as Vlautin will do from the caustic to the tenderly empathetic, is the forward momentum of this final album from his long-standing band Richmond Fontaine, and one presumes that having made this decision to end, he and the others will not go back. In many ways, all of the song-narratives are brutal, but there are those that take observation to its plainest honesty, and even the music refuses to offer plaintive sympathies to sooth the story-line. That’s how it is with the third on this album, I Got Off the Bus, and even before we listen we know the narrator has returned somewhere that should have been left in its past:

Our protagonist has returned home where a ‘friend’ said he’d pick him up, but doesn’t show; he makes his own way to Little Mexico, once a small street but now a sprawl that never ends; he calls a girl he used to know, a nurse, who had a place on 7^th Street, but her dad says she has moved and is married, living in Stockton with her baby, and the dad says he remembers him, but the narrator knows he is lying; he wakes up from a sleep somewhere to see a policeman standing over me [the chorus]; he goes to the movies but falls asleep there where a nervous 16 year old tells him he has to leave; the narrator – perhaps seeing himself in the boy – reflects you can’t go back if there’s nowhere to go back to; he goes to sit by the river where the sky was full of stars and the water was rust and the night was never ending; then there is a return to the chorus and he tells the policeman I didn’t mean to run out of everything but the policeman replies he doesn’t care as long as the narrator got out of there, and the song draws musically, and simply so, to its close.

This isn’t lyrical, but it is realistic, a tale told in the nothingness of its ordinariness but which touches because of that. The music here is more backdrop to the delivery than a mimetic carrier, and that gives it its own significance amongst the other stories of drifters and losers who reflect on their loss and misery. However – and this grows with the listening again and again – other songs are transferred with a greater musical partnership, this often conveyed through the inherent yearning of pedal steel, as with fourth Whitey and Me.

There are two songs that stand out for me in this memorable whole of such emotive storytelling, and the first is I Can’t Black It Out If I Wake Up and Remember. Rather than paraphrase the narrative – you will know its despairing reflection – it is Vlautin’s wholly empathetic vocal that pains here, the constant inflections upwards mirroring the hurt, it seems, and a beautiful wordless chorus line - also the guitar vibrato that slowly follows. The musical build-up to that cooed chorus – drums and bass so gently worked to offset the relative crescendo, and a brooding synth backdrop like we hear in Springsteen’s similar slow ballads – is unsettling.

The second is the penultimate song on the album, A Night in the City, and the pedal steel here, played by Paul Brainard, conveys the haunted telling again of unhappy living, this time the narrator breaking routine in some useless hope of the different and better: for once I didn’t go home after shift, called my wife and said I’d be late, every day it gets harder to go home after work, so he instead and ironically goes to the home of a workmate where his life is the same or worse, and the rest of the escape from this monotony is a tale of ordinary woe, and here the relentless slow beat of the drum drives to the mean poetry of the chorus the night in the city, oh the city at night [having arrived as listeners in a musical crescendo again], this symmetry offering no more than its platitude and this rhetorical question: is this all there is, is this what life is, a job that means nothing, a woman who sleeps right next to you – and she ain’t yours at all….?

I’ve written previously and many times how it is hard to know/describe the engagement one has as a listener to this despair without redemption of any kind [though the music, of course, in all its – there is no other word – plaintive glory does affect] so I return to the ‘answer’ I have suggested before, and that is its utter honesty.

For a final album, Richmond Fontaine as a band and Willy Vlautin as a songwriter have never been better, especially in their musically melancholic but memorable evocation of lives that are never better for being lived, compelling us as listeners to engage with this certainty even though we believe it will never happen to us.

I am looking forward to my vinyl copy of the album, ordered some time ago, and seeing the band at The Tunnels in Bristol on the 18^th April. [Added 7/3: have just learned the wonderful Fernando will be in support. He also played in support of The Delines at The Tunnels. It's going to be a great night for music].

The Delines - I Won't Slip Up

Speaking Up

Here's a powerful taster from the forthcoming album Colfax from The Delines, Willy Vlautin's new band. It's naturally in a similar Richmond Fontaine americana vein, fronted by the female vocal of Amy Boone, and telling also a typical Vlautin tale of everyday pain and hope for something better in life as the narrator speaks up for herself whilst also asking for help. Listen here.

Vlautin is a significant, talented musician and writer. I'm working on a major textbook at the moment and have included an extract of dialogue from Vlautin's wonderful book Lean on Pete to exemplify the effectiveness of presenting speech simply and yet realistically - he has a great writer's ear and  instinctive craft for presenting the powerful realism of ordinary lives, reminding of his hero Steinbeck as well as Carver.

Apology and Reprise: Richmond Fontaine - You Can't Go Back If There Is Nothing To Go Back To

Top Eleven, 2016

An admission of stupidity and apology to myself, in essence, I am publicly acknowledging I missed this from my Top Ten list for 2016, which is ridiculous, but even from my Preliminaries list which is just fucking stupid.

I don't think I'd supplant Gregory Porter or David Bowie as respectively 1 and 2, but Richmond Fontaine's final album, released this year [and I saw them perform it this year, just to hammer home the nonsense of the omission....], would have been 3rd. Has to be.

How did I miss it? Stupidity. Forgetfulness. Only using my digital records rather than checking out the vinyl. Not paying fucking attention.

Who cares? Probably just me. But I do like to get it right and I do admit my errors and here's the original review as self-compensation:

Never Better

In all our worlds, time advances inexorably – it is a simple law of nature – but in Vlautin’s and that inhabited by his many personas, that ‘progress’ forward is not as the cliché would have it, even if ironically, a move to betterment. Invariably, it is about dissolution, or at best, change: but it is never the same. As the album title tells us – and I am sure the line is directly or indirectly stated in many of Vlautin’s songs over the years with Richmond Fontaine and The Delines – you can’t go back. You can physically and therefore literally, but if you do, things will not be the same and they will most likely be worse, in most cases depressingly so.

Documenting such a harsh reality, as Vlautin will do from the caustic to the tenderly empathetic, is the forward momentum of this final album from his long-standing band Richmond Fontaine, and one presumes that having made this decision to end, he and the others will not go back. In many ways, all of the song-narratives are brutal, but there are those that take observation to its plainest honesty, and even the music refuses to offer plaintive sympathies to sooth the story-line. That’s how it is with the third on this album, I Got Off the Bus, and even before we listen we know the narrator has returned somewhere that should have been left in its past:

Our protagonist has returned home where a ‘friend’ said he’d pick him up, but doesn’t show; he makes his own way to Little Mexico, once a small street but now a sprawl that never ends; he calls a girl he used to know, a nurse, who had a place on 7^th Street, but her dad says she has moved and is married, living in Stockton with her baby, and the dad says he remembers him, but the narrator knows he is lying; he wakes up from a sleep somewhere to see a policeman standing over me [the chorus]; he goes to the movies but falls asleep there where a nervous 16 year old tells him he has to leave; the narrator – perhaps seeing himself in the boy – reflects you can’t go back if there’s nowhere to go back to; he goes to sit by the river where the sky was full of stars and the water was rust and the night was never ending; then there is a return to the chorus and he tells the policeman I didn’t mean to run out of everything but the policeman replies he doesn’t care as long as the narrator got out of there, and the song draws musically, and simply so, to its close.

This isn’t lyrical, but it is realistic, a tale told in the nothingness of its ordinariness but which touches because of that. The music here is more backdrop to the delivery than a mimetic carrier, and that gives it its own significance amongst the other stories of drifters and losers who reflect on their loss and misery. However – and this grows with the listening again and again – other songs are transferred with a greater musical partnership, this often conveyed through the inherent yearning of pedal steel, as with fourth Whitey and Me.

There are two songs that stand out for me in this memorable whole of such emotive storytelling, and the first is I Can’t Black It Out If I Wake Up and Remember. Rather than paraphrase the narrative – you will know its despairing reflection – it is Vlautin’s wholly empathetic vocal that pains here, the constant inflections upwards mirroring the hurt, it seems, and a beautiful wordless chorus line - also the guitar vibrato that slowly follows. The musical build-up to that cooed chorus – drums and bass so gently worked to offset the relative crescendo, and a brooding synth backdrop like we hear in Springsteen’s similar slow ballads – is unsettling.

The second is the penultimate song on the album, A Night in the City, and the pedal steel here, played by Paul Brainard, conveys the haunted telling again of unhappy living, this time the narrator breaking routine in some useless hope of the different and better: for once I didn’t go home after shift, called my wife and said I’d be late, every day it gets harder to go home after work, so he instead and ironically goes to the home of a workmate where his life is the same or worse, and the rest of the escape from this monotony is a tale of ordinary woe, and here the relentless slow beat of the drum drives to the mean poetry of the chorus the night in the city, oh the city at night [having arrived as listeners in a musical crescendo again], this symmetry offering no more than its platitude and this rhetorical question: is this all there is, is this what life is, a job that means nothing, a woman who sleeps right next to you – and she ain’t yours at all….?

I’ve written previously and many times how it is hard to know/describe the engagement one has as a listener to this despair without redemption of any kind [though the music, of course, in all its – there is no other word – plaintive glory does affect] so I return to the ‘answer’ I have suggested before, and that is its utter honesty.

For a final album, Richmond Fontaine as a band and Willy Vlautin as a songwriter have never been better, especially in their musically melancholic but memorable evocation of lives that are never better for being lived, compelling us as listeners to engage with this certainty even though we believe it will never happen to us.

Richmond Fontaine - Don't Skip Out On Me, album review

Wordless but Wonderful

This is most of what we might reasonably expect and welcome from a post-Richmond Fontaine Richmond Fontaine, the band having disbanded but briefly reconvened for this instrumental, so that is what is missing: the lyrics and the singing.

Otherwise it is a collection of mainly and most welcoming pedal steel plaintive – the lyricism of melody describing as best it can in a wordless soundscape the landscape of Willy Vlautin’s latest novel. So, titles like Horace Hopper and Victor Gets on the Bus tell us it is a soundtrack, the first delivered in the pedal steel and the second in a fleeting acoustic guitar calm. Third Dream of the City and the City Itself is, as title, a piece of language that is signature Vlautin, then its opening melody is all Country hoedown until the song breaks into the most beautiful other signature, a lamenting minor key descend with, yes, pedal steel. Fourth Living Where You’re Not Wanted is again initially the language of Vlautin’s embrace of people’s alienation and its prompt to escape in search of something better – rarely achieved though there will be moments of human kindness experienced along the way – and this is embraced in instrumental performance by a cowboy camp-fire harmonica lead, with more like this later on, for example penultimate We Are Cattlemen [aptly] that segues prettily if hauntingly into closer Back of the Pickup.

Can’t wait to read the novel.

Richmond Fontaine, with support from Fernando - The Tunnels, Bristol, 18th April, 2016

The End

Willy Vlautin with The Delines, and Fernando in support, last played The Tunnels in November 2014 and that was a brilliant gig.

Last night's return had Fernando playing a sweet set with long time recording and performing partner guitarist Dan Eccles [also from RF]. So much of the material Fernando played consisted of gentle ballads so this highlights his wonderful vocal but also quality as a performer because it is hard, it seems to me, to engage an audience - as he did fully - with that kind of thoughtful, meditative pace, as you might expect in a totally acoustic folk setting. It has to be said that Eccles' amped-up guitar work adds phenomenal depth to the live presentation of Fernando's great songs, including covers, and the reverb/tremolo he gets from vibrating the neck is amazing 

This return also had Willy now with long-time band Richmond Fontaine playing on their farewell tour, and songs from their final album You Can't Go Back If There's Nothing To Go Back To featured throughout: those familiar plaintive Vlautin narratives in Wake Up Ray, I Can't Black It Out If I Can't Wake Up, I Got Off The Bus and A Night In The City. These are so moving in their storytelling core, but the band playing live fill this out with other emotional depths, with Freddy Trujillo on thumping bass and some lovely harmony vocals, and the great Sean Oldham on backbone drums and also vocal duties. Eccles is again so influential in this, the haunting resonance of his guitar work on A Night in the City a fine example. And as a whole tight band! In addition to these musical vignettes, the band rocked in older, earlier RF numbers [and hard-core fans from that past clearly enjoyed this selection from the archives] as well as from a Ventures-esque instrumental to a psychedelic jam like The Door's The End in Apocalypse Now.

But I hope they all return again in whatever formation brings them back to the UK.

My reviews of both Fernando's latest here and Richmond Fontaine's here.

Kurt Vile - b'lieve i'm goin down..., album review

Not Craig David

With an Americana take on Craig David’s 7 Days [not literally, c’mon], Kurt Vile has engaged me in a way that he hasn’t previously, despite the persistent accolades about his music. And I don’t literally mean just on this opener, Pretty Pimpin, from his latest album to be released in September, but the rest too, like second I’m an Outlaw which is a simple enough tune but enhanced by the dominant banjo. Third Dust Bunnies continues the straightforward songwriting – perhaps something about this plainness has been a barrier to me on previous listens of his previous, which I now need to revisit/reassess – but the simplicity is made interesting by the lyrics [You may think that it's funny now/That I got a headache like a shotback coffin dust bunnies/It's hard to see when it's all red/And all you hear are just white noises], the expressive talking vocal and basic organ notes of this song. Even more so next That’s Life Tho Almost Hate to Say which is a dour spoken narrative, but the storytelling and acoustic guitar playing embrace it in an atmospheric aural vista, and here I think of other stories – not in content – told in similar if more expansive musical soundscapes by Willy Vlautin.

Vile’s storytelling is, however, more introspective than the creation of a voice for various personas that is Vlautin’s brilliant focus. For example, the fifth track on this album Wheelhouse seems entirely personal:

Sometimes I talk too much but I gotta get it out

But I don’t wanna talk, I only wanna listen

My baby talks soft, my ears are always ringing now

Humming a sad song when I’m alone

But you gotta be alone to figure things out sometimes

Be alone, when even in a crowd of friends and not so

Sometimes of whom you just can’t distinguish but

Thank god for the former, yeah

Again, the spoken narrative is mesmerising as is the haunting guitar backdrop over the acoustic playing in the foreground. I’m less gripped by the rap-esque presentation of sixth Life Like This, but I can imagine the appeal to a ‘younger’ audience. All in a Daze Work returns us to the simplicity of talking over sweetly played/plucked acoustic guitar, and I am compelled to recall another precursor sound – which may seem odd – of The Incredible String Band.

This is a mature and memorable album, and I need to learn more about the journey to it.