Willard Grant Conspiracy’s fifth album may be interchangeable with any amount of acts who found shelter from grunge and nu-metal downpours in the form of hillbilly mountain hollers, but that shouldn’t blind us to the fact that it’s a fine record all the same.
For a start, Robert Fisher has the voice to carry it off, somewhere between Nick Cave’s woebegone baritone and Mark Lanegan’s sore-headed growl. Secondly, the songs are good and faithful updates of Appalachian and swampland folk forms, with plain and unfussy arrangements, mostly acoustic guitar, piano and the moaning violin of Josh Hillman, who plays like a more gentrified version of Warren Ellis. Thirdly, there’s the vocal input of Jess Klein and Kristin Hersh, who both function as a McGarrigles-type Greek chorus on tunes like ‘River In The Pines’ (they would have to be pines, wouldn’t they – I mean, don’t any of these newfangled country folk do deciduous?) and ‘The Ghost Of The Girl In The Well’, the latter binding Scottish, English, Irish and Arkansas weeping songs to modern urban myths like The Ring.
However, Fisher has a derivative bent that keeps his refrains from ever truly transcending their settings. Compare the album’s closing chorus of, “Suffering’s gonna come to everyone someday” to Bonnie Prince Billy’s far creepier and funnier, “Death to everyone is gonna come/And it makes hosing much more fun”. If Fisher could exercise a little more editorial rigour, he might become more of his own man. Until then, this is a good band waiting to be great.