Have you ever wondered whether alt-country is representing its electorate? All these sorry tales of murder, blood-spilt love and the dead cow skulls scattered by gravel roads have become so synonymous with the music of the Midwest and the songs of the South, that it becomes easy to lose perspective. Are the likes of Houston and Omaha really the barren, backwards dustbowl towns you hear of in songs? Are there no people who wear suits, drive foreign cars, sip lattés and read the New York Times while making snide remarks about Bush? Yes, of course there are. So why doesn't the music ever reflect that?
The Willard Grant Conspiracy is another clichéd country band, another bunch of blues-ridden, fire-and-brimstone missionaries whose opaque, gothic hymnals add to the myth of Americana. They've never been great, even back to 1998's sort-of well regarded Flying Low, a record that, in retrospect, seems virtually identical to all their others. Now on their fifth record, the band has shown no signs of growth, and the fact that their core partnership of frontman Robert Foster and guitarist Paul Austin is augmented by an alumni of assorted waifs, strays and passers-by (including Kristin Hersh, and members of Lambchop and The Walkabouts) does nothing to alleviate the sameness of what is essentially another set of safe, formulaic ballads for the No Depression set.
By all measures, Regard the End is a conventionally "beautiful" record. Robert Fisher's bass-tinged voice can stretch from meek and tender to intense and bellowing, with an aged wisdom that adds grace and gravity to tracks like the near-Celtic lament "Beyond the Shore". They've also got the knack for "tasteful" arrangements. On the pompously titled "Ghost of the Girl in the Well", guitars strum and shimmer in line with Foster's voice while a bored rhythm section reminds the band to stay awake. Strings sway, shiver, and flail helplessly, reaching for a heartstring to grab.
Yet, for the most part, The Willard Grant Conspiracy are grabbing at thin air. On tracks like "Rosalee", you're stunned by the utterly formulaic approach to some of the songwriting. As an acoustic guitar sparks up its folksy strum, Foster dictates a tale of a girl that refuses to speak with all the melodic distinctiveness of a Dave Matthews tune, before a violin takes its cue, embellishing the song with some unnecessary attention-seeking. This cycle repeats itself for 3\xBD minutes before stumbling to a failed, idea-drained finish.
And then there's the suffering-- lots of it, all over the album-- not all of which belongs to the bored-to-tears listener. On closing track "The Suffering Song", Foster moans about how "mother's got a few days left/ She thinks it's time we all learnt to pray." And as the song climbs to its climax, with the rousing chorus of "suffering's going to come to everyone someday," you certainly get the sense that, well, he might be suffering a bit.
But suffering from what? What infuriates most about this record is not its rigid predictability, its absence of invention or its reliance on tired-out alt-country clichés; it's the fact that throughout Regard the End, the songs rely on only the vaguest utterances of emotion, amounting to little more than a bad landscape painting-- all grand brushstrokes, no substance or detail. It seems that the band is fully competent of evoking a mood, but incapable of articulating why.
Rarely has a genre sounded so tried and tired, so forced, formulaic and reliant on its own mythology as country music is made to sound on Regard the End. Though its application and musicianship is admirable, its lack of lyrical argument or narrative leave us with a canon of paceless funereal laments that conjure endless feelings of enforced sadness without explanation. In a field full of fellow lovesick souls, these are failings we simply shouldn't have to accept.
