Longtime fans of Wooden Wand forsook consistency long ago, if they ever expected any at the start: During the last decade, James Jackson Toth has used that handle and variations on it to release a mountain of barely compatible material, from the wild-eyed incantations of his often-knotty early work with Wooden Wand & the Vanishing Voice to the outlaw country ignominy of Born Bad, released simply and defiantly as WAND. He traveled to the very fringes of what’s been dubiously dubbed freak-folk on Buck Dharma, and he settled in for hearthside romanticism and wanderlust on 2010’s Michael Gira-produced Death Seat. During his very brief tenure with Ryko, and under his given name, he experimented with the role of refined ringleader, guiding players like Nels Cline, John Dieterich, and Carla Bozulich through crackling, generally concise and great rock tunes. A year before, however he'd stretched ideas into 10- and 12-minute sprawls as the high-for-life Hassara. The enormity and variety of Toth's oeuvre confounds the usual appellations like singer and songwriter, bandleader, and pied piper; rather, he’s seemed mostly a headstrong musician, conceding one by one to an array of artistic impulses, for better and worse.
But on Blood Oaths of the New Blues, Wooden Wand's proper debut for British vanguard Fire Records, the sometimes-arduous job of tracing Toth's stylistic shifts culminates in an album that captures the best essences of his career in 41 seamless minutes. At once, Toth has merged the singer with the songwriter with the shaman, delivering some of his most potent lines with his most assured singing, surrounded by a band that seems to have learned rock 'n' roll's tropes only to stunt or subvert them. Like the finest work of Richard Buckner or Phosphorescent, Blood Oaths of the New Blues recasts songs that could have come from country music or the blues or Bob Dylan in an intricate Americana gloaming. At last, Toth treats the words and the arrangements with the same ingenuity and devotion, arriving at the most accessible and narcotic record of his career.
In 2011, Toth issued Briarwood, a strong country-rock set recorded in Homewood, Ala., with a quintet of area musicians. For the first time since Wooden Wand sloughed its Vanishing Voice suffix, the same supporting cast returns to a consecutive Toth effort for Blood Oaths of the New Blues. The ensemble's playing for Briarwood seems in retrospect almost like an entrance exam-- proficient and thorough, a demonstration of fundamentals for the new boss. Here, however, they use country, rock, and blues as origins and not endpoints, turning chances for obvious maneuvers into invitations for thoughtful subtlety and reinvention. Rather than resolve, guitar hooks hang like smoky rings and question marks in the air. Janet Elizabeth Simpson's gorgeous harmonies expertly trail just behind Toth, adding intrigue and ambiguity to the narration. Listen on headphones, and notice the layers of noise and backward vocals beneath the tracks, haunting these characters like old ghosts and bad memories.
With its wrapped lines of pedal steel and train-track rhythm, astral country trot "Supermoon (The Sounding Line)" demands the kind of long-winded guitar solo that a session musician such as Lloyd Maines might happily supply. When the moment comes, though, Jody Nelson obliges only for an instant, easing quick bursts of notes from his pedal steel. He soon backs off, letting his notes gather instead into ponderous little clouds, reflecting the song's mix of resignation and wherewithal more than a properly fanciful solo ever would. And "Outsider Blues", a song that calls Mississippi Fred McDowell and Sticky Fingers by name, lives up to its title by warping the shape of its blues travelogue with scrims of harsh noise and peripatetic hand drums, somewhere-in-space harmonies and refracted guitar leads. "Southern Colorado Song", the fiery rock number about the bank-robbing Dougherty Gang, smolders rather than flares, omitting theatrics or solos so as to emphasize the undecided plight of its subjects-- American kids, lost without money or a clue, on the lam simply because "sometimes nowhere seems the only place to go."
Toth's portrait of the Doughterys is neither overly sympathetic nor judgmental. Their doomed escape across the American heartland was neither right nor wrong, he suggests-- it just was. That sense of existential acceptance permeates Blood Oath of the New Blues, affording songs ripped from the headlines or rescued from personal journals necessary empathy and intimacy. "Dungeons of Irons", for instance, examines the plight of suspected witches killed by paranoid citizens but pardoned centuries later, which actually happened in Cologne last year. "I hope nobody's got anything against me now," Toth sings, recognizing that, as a collective, we're still capable of excusing madness. During the brilliant opening gambit, a two-song medley called "No Bed For Beatle Wand/Days This Long", Toth wrestles with religion and luck, with anxiety and reassurance. "Who can tell? Who can know? Who can see? It's hard to believe," he offers with the charisma of a soul singer, strangely comfortable as he asks questions he knows he'll never answer. Toth not only balances the strength of songs and arrangements here; he links aphorisms meant to be rolled around for a lifetime with details that suggest he's not only full of rhetorical shit.
Blood Oaths closes with "No Debts", Toth's hopeful and simple two-minute love letter to a settled life. "No debts/ no liens/ no postponement of dreams/ no more moving around," he sings over unadorned acoustic guitar chords, his voice and instrument mostly free of effects or artifice. The song sits strangely at the album's end, much like Dylan's charming "Buckets of Rain" served as the unexpected epilogue for the otherwise-arranged Blood on the Tracks. At first, these few verses might suggest a late addition to the album, a tune that the band simply didn't have time to treat. But the album begins with an arid drone for faint harmonium and backwoods electric guitar-- the sort of theme the latter-day version of Earth might release in happier times or that, back when freak-folk was in vogue, Wooden Wand & the Vanishing Voice might have vamped on for an hour. Those bookends are symbolic of Toth's larger stylistic synthesis on Blood Oaths, a record that, as "No Debts" surmises, sees that Wooden Wand's "ship has finally come in." If you’ve liked anything Toth has done in the past, whether that's the tunes he's written or the textures he's conjured, Blood Oaths offers both, perhaps better than ever before. If you've dismissed him, though, this is the sound of one musician's prolific and mercurial path, reaching delightful new highs.
