During the last quarter-century, Dylan Carlson has helped reshape the electric guitar’s possibilities not once, but twice. In the first phase of his band Earth, Carlson stood at the center of the duo’s colossal drone tide, with his creeping riffs and masterful control of distortion seeming to trace the outer reaches of infinity itself. Those records are landmarks and baselines. When Earth returned nearly a decade later as a full band, Carlson’s riffs were thin and refined, each elegant note landing like a pastel ray of light. He had found a new context for his regal, slow-motion language, one that underscored the drone inherent in primal blues. Those records are guideposts, a reminder that an innovator can always be reinvented.
During the last five years, Carlson has entered another restless phase and turned to albums of primarily solo electric guitar, where the occasional collaborators are there mostly to add texture to his themes. As Drcarlsonalbion, he has mined European ballads for cycles of instrumental folk songs and scored a Western film. Now, at last under his own name, Carlson has taken the next logical step and written what he calls “an imaginary Western,” which wordlessly traces the historic story of a conquistador exploring what is now the American Southwest a half-millennium ago. The 32-minute Conquistador feels slight, especially against the landmarks of Carlson’s career, but it does open at least one intriguing avenue for future exploration.
Conquistador unfurls like a screenplay. The title track is an extended invocation in which a simple, central riff coils and loops and warps against a rising web of noise; we are, in essence, meeting the characters and imagining the tangle of possible plotlines and misfortunes they could encounter. With “When the Horses Were Shorn of Their Hooves,” the drama arrives in earnest. Carlson’s guitar is agitated and irascible, the riff practically showing its teeth and shaking its fists. Something very bad is bound to happen. But first, there’s a forced pause, a brief interlude for plucked lute and scraped cymbals. This is the itinerant widescreen scan of the foreboding scenery. You can imagine the rolling tumbleweed or hear a lonesome whistle in the distance.
In Act II, things happen quickly: During “Scorpions in Their Mouth,” things go from bad to worse, and that stately theme from the opening “Conquistador” goes to battle. Carlson’s tone is bulbous and barbed, its growl harking back to those young, angry days in Earth. Then, at last, there’s an escape from danger to the halcyon coast, beautifully rendered in “Reaching the Gulf.” Carlson’s guitar seems to smile as it sighs, as our hero licks wounds that could have been much worse. Carlson is an efficient, effective storyteller, a trait that was never quite clear in Earth’s enormous impressionism.
But Conquistador, like much of what Carlson has done outside of Earth, feels only like a second draft of an idea from his sketchbook, the transitional point to something that could be truly magnificent. The album suggests a full story, but it still seems paradoxically fragmentary. After its slow burn fades, after our hero has returned home, what’s best about Conquistador might be the sense of possibility it poses. Having scored an actual Western film with minimal guitar vignettes, here he has shaped his amplifier worship into an auditory Western largely for solo guitar.
So what’s next in that stepwise process? A through-composed score for a big-budget Western or an actual Cormac McCarthy adaptation? Perhaps, but it’s more tantalizing to imagine Carlson taking the trail of fellow guitar hero Bill Frisell, who has turned troves of old portraits or scenes from the Mississippi River Flood of 1927 into fully realized, entirely immersive stage shows. Here’s a free idea for an expensive production for any ambitious arts presenter, then: Commission Carlson to fully realize his 21st-century Western. Otherwise, his ideas may continue to drift in this middle distance, and he’s too good for that.
