HENRY WAGONS
The Four Seasons (Cheatin Hearts)
NO, NOT A COUNTRY/ROCK interpretation of Vivaldi’s perennial favourite. Though you wouldn’t put it past Henry Wagons to try that. For a laugh, and to make a point about the flexibility of music, the variety in country music, and, incidentally, the way everything sounds strangely appealing when sung by a deep-voiced man.
Which is Wagons’ charm and curse.
For some listeners – ok, yes, me in this case, but I know I’m not alone – there is a fondness for Wagons’ wit and his ability to know/love the form while playing with some of the absurdities of it too. We feel the same way after all: well aware of the very thin line between a great piece of country-ana and a hilarious piece of country-ana, and that some songs contain both. Especially, and I can’t emphasise this enough, when sung by a man with a deep voice.
Think The Handsome Family, Orville Peck, Tex Perkins, Lee Hazelwood, and even at a stretch Magnetic Fields – and you can add half a dozen more of your own choosing. It’s a full rig. Think too of the way when asked to sing a country song men will almost always default to a world-wearied baritone/bass, probably while bowing their legs a little bit and hitching up an imaginary gun belt or tipping a hat. Ma'am.
So when Wagons sings about a Freight Train (Going South), which opens with a train horn, sports some spectral backing voices, and includes the line “once you ride this train, you ain’t gonna want to ride trains no more”, or when he becomes an initially reluctant then proselytising lover in I’m Glad I Fell In Love With You, which includes mandolins and pedal steel that I am contractually obligated as a reviewer to refer to as weeping, and Wagon saying “howdy partner”, you will be smiling as well as singing.
Which is fine – they are good songs – but can we, even more than Wagons, switch mode when we listen to Park At The Station (Friends Of Mine), a semi-mechanised rhythm/rising trumpets/yet almost quintessential Melbourne ballad of a song that is essentially in the same mode as Freight Train and I’m Glad I …, but brings an existential crisis and the people we cling to to the soul edge of country? Should we?
How about the blues weight on Are You Impressed, which comes with whiskey breath, a dog reference, real anger and the line “I feel like a fraud, I feel like a fool” where fool is pronounced with an accent that might be Will Ferrell?
This is without so far mentioning the four instrumental interludes that are the title tracks. Autumn comes across as a mood piece from a modern western: suggestions of space and freedom, tempered by implications of death and despair; travelling, but at night; alone, and maybe lonely. Summer leans into the Sergio Leone setting/Ennio Morricone soundtrack: echoey and spooky, brass and whistling, banjo and timpani, grand and yet gritty and small scale.
Winter is brief, acoustic guitar and windy synths; the 39 second-long Spring is briefer still: a throbbing bass prominent, south-of-the-border trumpet, claps and chants recalling that Morricone-esque Summer. Intriguing pieces that still nod to influences and our assumptions; almost certainly too short but maybe any longer and we’d be in parody territory; serious but also comic.
Maybe the answer, if there is one, can be found in two duets with fellow Melburnian, Queenie, who can sound windswept and ready to run just as easily as pissed off and ready to rumble – in other words, a perfect country lead.
In Open The Door, Queenie brings some Neko Case and Lisa Miller solid-strength airiness to the table in a song that builds to a (musically) violent climax from a tense, beginning-to-boil opening. The contrasting voices vie for righteousness, one seeking redemption and belief, the other all too aware of who is who in this potential relationship, and the song tightens as it thickens in sound, until an explosion must come. And all this happens in well under three minutes, but nothing feels underexplored.
In Surrender, the two sides of a burgeoning, if already looking troubled, romance eschew swagger for a bit more vulnerability and offer a love song that isn’t quite a love song. The slow shuffle rhythm, the pedal steel, and the instruments set back a little further behind the vocals, make for an atmosphere of hesitation holding back need and wisdom regretting itself. There is a lot to work with here, but for me at least there is something undercutting that potential, and it may be the suggestion of knowingness in the performers or the production that pulls us out of the emotion of the story and into something more like wry observation.
It’s tricky. And quite subjective, obviously. But it’s a series of questions that just aren’t going to go away while ever Henry Wagons – a man for all seasons – writes good songs, writes clever songs, and writes (maybe) funny songs, sung in that voice.
The Four Seasons is out Friday, August 16.
READ MORE
Komentáře