This is country at its most progressive. Dusty Wright, veteran of the Dusty Diamonds and others on the NYC circuit, is a transplanted Midwesterner who isn’t afraid of flaunting technology. There’s electronic treatments and insanely wet reverb all over the album, even a very effective, real-sounding cello sample on “Who Should Take the Blame”, but the record never sounds slick or overproduced — just dark, sexy and sometimes gritty. The album closer, “Retribution Slide”, is a fate-drenched blues, scary and sinewy and loaded with razor-sharp slide guitar by Wright on a Rickenbacker 12-string.
On four other tracks, six-string solo honors go to Mark Lonergan (ex-Band of Susans), a regular member of Dusty’s otherwise amorphous Wright Brothers band. The band here, besides Wright and Lonergan, consists of London-based players, and they traverse Wright’s panoply of styles with assurance. “Anastasia” gets a gallumphing Allman Brothers-like arrangement, slightly marred by Wright’s occasional vocal mannerism of sliding away from some held notes in a pronounced manner. The stripped-down “Ghosts” recalls Nick Drake, while “Happened Upon” gets an ethereal arrangement with foreground elements (pedal steel licks, light vocals) that float around each other, grounded by the bass and the fast, basic country rhythm.
The seductive yet almost humorous “Close The Door” (imagine a self-aware Romeo taking refuge in mock-irony) finds the vocals full of portamento, but here it’s more appropriate. The sheer timbral variety, with mandolin and two distinct guitar sounds tumbling after each other in quick succession, shows that Wright’s willingness to experiment sometimes finds roots in some very traditional ground — it recalls the swift series of short solos so common in Western swing. “I Believe In Forever” is a very traditional weeper, but the shimmering space around the instruments, especially the almost new-agey pedal steel (sounding much more like its Hawaiian ancestor) sets it apart.
A few tracks, such as “(Time) Time Is Now”, will strike purists as not being country at all, that song featuring a fat, loping bass line and the dark psychedelia of its electric guitars, but the drawl in Dusty’s voice keeps the connection. And then the very next track, “Far Away”, starts spare and acoustic, its subsequent sweet pedal steel and guitar chords like the heat rising off a desert road making it a classic bittersweet plaint. Dusty Wright is a lover of country, but he’s not content to mimic styles; rather, he builds on them in interesting ways.
