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Features The Wheel Thing Sunday, December 30, 2007 Wagons Return Wiser And More Refined Than Ever. By Martin Jones
Wagons just keep on rolling… building up momentum, and band-members, with each new record. Gradually honing their gothic electric folk tales to the kind of artform level that few Australian bands dare to even shoot for, let alone accomplish. As the Grand Sage of wisdom and insight Dave Graney recently wrote: “The album, the Curse Of Lightning, is a classic. A modern classic. People will enjoy it for years to come. You are a great pop band, a great rock band and a great country singer and your songs are full of wisdom and great insights.”
Following on from the Melbourne outfit’s first albums, Trying To Get Home (2002) and Draw Blood (2004), Wagons’ new album Curse Of Lightning is an exercise in refinement. The tales have more impact, the melodies more insidious, and the arrangements more distilled and focused. With an imposing presence that reminds me of Willard Grant Conspiracy’s Robert Foster, Handsome Family’s Brett Sparks, and Mr D Graney himself, Henry’s baritone is both beguiling and compelling. It’s a far more mature and wised Henry behind the helm of Curse Of Lightning – and it shows.
“Yeah well, look this is definitely a more honest and mature offering than before,” Henry agrees. “This record’s more about Henry the songwriter as opposed to Henry the young man with grand production ideas. Yeah and maybe a few years wiser, well actually, probably at least a good three or four years have gone by since I wrote the songs on Draw Blood. I have no idea what happened to me in the last four or five years but maybe I’m a bit more of a withered oak than when I was a young punk who wrote those last bunch of songs. I’m glad you can hear it!”
Well Dave Graney certainly can!
“Oh yeah, fuck, I was pretty happy with that. That was a good way to wake up in the morning, that’s nice. He’s been a sort of mentor for us and we’ve had our share of conversations over the years and he’s not too happy with the fact that we’re kind of categorised as a Johnny Cash country outfit. He tends to think we’ve got more potential – who knows if that’s true or not. But he’s always compared us, he always thought we were more akin to Mental As Anything. And if I look at myself in the mirror I can see, metaphorically speaking, maybe I smack a bit of Greedy Smith. Who knows?”
Henry chuckles with approval when identify a ‘velvet hammer’ element that has always been present in Wagons. That hammer is softer yet more forceful than ever on Curse Of Lightning, the stories and sentiments strong, but without being confrontational.
“Mmm, yeah, be it consciously or subconsciously, my writing seems to always been drawn to bitter and twisted stories,” Henry muses, “but in terms of my melodic sense, I like easy moods. So the combination can, well hopefully it’s an interesting one. I wanted to make, I wanted this mood to come out of the dampness and mist that you’d imagine on the dawn of a redwood forest morning, so all the stories come out of… they’re very inspired by Deliverance style atmosphere. I love the idea of what goes on in the backwaters of the American Redwood forests. And what seeps out of those mountain streams – the blood, gore, wisdom and ignorance of the American West, it was a great inspiration to me on this record.”
Curse Of Lightning is available on Spunk through EMI.
Read the full article in January Rhythms.
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