The Emperors of Wyoming

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The USP for The Emperors of Wyoming is the presence of Butch Vig, ace producer and Garbage drum peddler with the smoke signals billowing headlines such as “Butch Vig makes country rock album!” Well it ain’t exactly like that. Truth is that back in the eighties Vig and the other Emperors (Phil Davis, vocals, guitars, Pete Anderson, bass, guitars and Frank Anderson, lap and pedal steel guitars, keyboards and banjo) played in a couple of Madison, Wisconsin bands before going their separate ways. In 2009 Anderson enlisted his pals to help him realise a bunch of tunes he had been working on. Scattered across the USA they agreed to join in however there was no grand “class reunion” but rather a welter of emails and wav files tossed back and forth until they came up with this, the finished product, a band who haven’t played together in the same room so far.
Despite this remote way of working its fair to say that The Emperors have come up with a classy product with the overall cohesiveness belaying any concerns regarding the recording process. It isn’t country rock in the sense that Poco or the early Eagles were, instead it tends to ape the likes of Tom Petty, Chuck Prophet and the Stones in their country guise. Davis’s voice strains at times although he can sound a little like Petty and there’s even a touch of Jagger’s sneering drawl on I’m Your Man. From the Neil Young like strummed guitar that opens The Bittersweet Sound of Goodbye (and lets not forget where the band name comes from) to the thunderous and monumental riffing of The Pinery Boy the album is corkful of very radio friendly sounds.
While Avalanche Girl may be a little formulaic lyrically it yearns to beam over the airwaves with its familiar Petty like jangle, similarly Cruel Love Ways hits all the right buttons but fails really to take off. The band more than make up for this elsewhere, upping the ante both lyrically and musically. Cornfield Palace starts off with a piece of lyrical corn
“I’m in love with a girl with a cornfield palace/she’s the queen of West Alliss/ in her SUV/ she like’s to watch Dallas on her big TV”
but it swings like a tipsy Dixie Queen dancing to Crazy Horse at the sloppiest best. Brand New Heart of Stone has a narcotic feel with evil sounding guitars and a percussive drive that almost lapses into dub at times. One gets the feeling that Keith Richards would love this song. Sweep Away is almost a country ballad albeit one that has been stewed in a goat’s head soup for some time and there’s even a touch of the stones’ whoops from Sympathy For the Devil towards the end. The album’s highlight however is the majestic and stately Never Got Over You which builds to a fine climax with fine pedal steel and guitar interludes.

Proper records

Dave Provost. My Favorite Ghost/Stephen David Austin. A Bakersfield Dozen.

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What’s a jobbing musician to do these days without label backing or deep pockets of their own? While we get major label releases here at Blabber’n’Smoke for review the majority are self released so its no surprise to see that Kickstarter is increasingly used as a fundraising source. Indeed Stuart Murdoch of Belle and Sebastian recently raised a sizeable amount to Kickstart a movie project that otherwise might never have seen the light of day.
Anyway, Nantucket based Dave Provost used Kickstarter to fund this, his second album and for that we can be grateful. Provost sits comfortably in that section of your collection that contains the likes of Steve Earle, Bruce Springsteen and John Hiatt (as long as you don’t have your albums in alphabetical order). Kicking off with the self assured strut of Hall of Bones the guitars ring out while an organ slightly swells before a chiming guitar solo, add Tom Petty to the above mentioned mentors and you have an idea of what this sounds like. Unplugging for the next song, Little Red Guitar, we get a slow country waltz sweetened by some fine pedal steel but the following Hula Girl digs into a bluesier and swampy groove. Mark Cutler’s slide oozes menace while Provost sounds somewhat like Jace Everett’s impassioned vocals on Bad Things. While Provost delivers more driving anthemic tales on Corners of the Sky and Up in the Air the majority of the remaining songs are pitched in a lower key. Please Stop Talking is a delicate acoustic tapestry with twinkling mandolin, rippling guitar and accordion while Partner in Crime features some fine Dobro playing (from Chris Boyd) on what might be the best song here. Almost the best song here we should say. While Provost covers Steve Earle’s I Ain’t Ever Satisfied the other cover, Rowland Salley’s Killing the Blues is indeed a veritable killer and knocks spots off of other versions by John Prine and Robert Plant.

Website

Partner In crime

On first listen this sounds just like yet another album of well played honky tonking country songs very much in the Bakersfield tradition with the likes of Merle Haggard and Dwight Yoakam beaming at you through the beers and tears. A fine cast of players, described in the liner notes as “the tortured artists” do provide a thrilling sound with Marty Rifkin on pedal and lap steel guitar standing out with his magnificent fills and solo slots. With fiddle, Dobro and banjo all appearing on occasion Austin covers all the bases to the extent that the album could be well recommended to anyone who digs, well, that “Bakersfield” sound.
However Austin has a trick up his sleeve. Wading through the many fine licks here one eventually finds his lyrics which are certainly a notch above what one expected. While he’s able to craft an almost perfect tale of a jailbird heading home after a 40 year stretch (The Cage) and deliver an affectionate homage to the late Buck Owens (The Day Buck Owens Died) several of his songs have a wry, sardonic edge to them. Heroes and Heroin namechecks Captain Trips aka Jerry Garcia on a cautionary anti drug song while Kansas Ain’t in Kansas Anymore is a powerful diatribe against the encroaching gang warfare that used to be emblematic of the likes of LA but which now infests middle America. On The Fat Kid he deals with bullying at school coming across like a Telecaster wielding Randy Newman as he sings “ he’s a fat kid, a loser and a freak, a pachyderm pariah, a mesomorphic geek.” He gets bang up to date on MySpace where he damns the dilemma of having to use the net to promote his music and being pulled into the whole social networking whirlpool. Overall Austin’s debut is mighty impressive indeed.

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The Cage