Happy-sad third album from SoCal country-rockers.
The pitch for the music of The Far West, whose new album is their first since 2014, is “horribly painful songs that you can dance to”, according to bass player Robert Black. There is less pain, however, than resignation and expectation, but the arrangements often mask this. There are more swayalongs than hootenannies here, but Black is right about danceability on the infectious ‘Meet Me Where We Parted Last’, which uses the horn section well, and the far too short ‘In Your Own Time’ (“things will come, just as surely as the rising sun”).
‘See For Yourself’ opens the album with the sort of music Bob Dylan was making for ‘Blonde On Blonde’; indeed, there’s a lyrical nod to the man on “this rolling stone is now covered in moss”. The song also includes the first of many really excellent passages of electric guitar that elevate the album. On ‘Hope I Don’t Bleed’, vocalist Lee Briante is channelling late-period Dylan as he croons about the end of his days.
Briante bends his voice into different shapes throughout the album, giving it an impressive textural variety. Across the dozen songs, many of the lyrics express hope for the future. They could be about love, as on ‘Miss Me Too’ or ‘Soft Place To Land’ (“I wonder if you’ll let me in”), or they could be about the world at large. There’s the piano-assisted future nostalgia of ‘Better Days’ (“many years from now maybe things will look better”) and the appealing country-rock singalong ‘Happy Now’, which opens the album’s second side.
‘Joshua Tree’ is one of the album’s slower songs, here documenting a visit to the desert, and it is followed by ‘These Lies’, where the arrangement rather gives the game away even as the singer is “pretending everything is fine”. It is one of many songs on the album which reach beyond the I-IV-V chord progression so familiar to country and rock.
The melancholy ‘For The Birds’ begins “if I was a car, I would not start” and concludes “singing’s just for birds” over gentle acoustic guitar and a wash of electric. ‘Over The Hill’ includes prominent organ to close the album on a funereal note, although once again the lyric is flecked with hope: “on the downhill side, they say life is a thrill”.
It seems strange to think the music, which was recorded well before the pandemic, was left unreleased for so long. Perhaps the rescue of the master recordings during this year’s LA fires prompted the band to deliver the studio versions, and the world is all the better for it.
