Customer Reviews

Winnemucca

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I loved Richmond Fontaine's previous two albums, especially Lost Son, their latest before Winnemucca. But with Winnemucca, Richmond Fontaine have outdone themselves. I must say that this is one of the best, most timeless, touching, and simply gorgeous albums in the entire "alt.country" genre, if not in all music. Willy Vlautin's lyrics are evocative, emotional, and show so much pathos for the type of person i like to call the 'sensitive ...-up'. These types pepper his songs...like the kid being driven by his brother to a jail for low-level offenders (you know, the type who choose to imbibe a substance other than alcohol and have to spend the rest of their life paying for our society's hypocrisy)...and ray thames from 'five degrees below zero' who pawned all his stuff and now has to live at his uncle's due to some imaginable addiction or mess up (as a female ray thames, i know exactly how miserable this kind of thing can be). They reach musical, not just lyrical, epiphany here too, from each tear-jerking pedal steel note to the wails of feedback on the second instrumental "Patty's Retreat", Richmond Fontaine have not gotten the kind of attention that many other past and present alt.country bands have gotten, and all I can say is its a damn shame. They make Uncle Tupelo sound coarse, Ryan Adams sound like a bratty punk, and the supposedly "seminal" Gram Parsons sound like the most overrated performer in the history of the genre. And to the few who may agree with this review, I'd suggest you check out Pinetop Seven, another wonderful and unappreciated 'alt.country' band. Their album "Rigging The Toplights" has the same kind of gorgeous fairground melancholy as "Winnemucca". Also try Hem's debut album, "Rabbit Songs" for a similar kind of beauty with amazing female vocals. If the three of them played LA sometime soon, it would be sheer musical heaven.

Shades of Jay Farrar and Matthew Ryan. "Five Degrees Below Zero" is worth the price of admission alone. Wish these talented guys out of Oregon would do some touring. Mr. V is a great writer, and I can just sit around all day reciting the lyrics. Great effort!!

Richmond Fontaine (band name, not a person apparently) uses the detail of the Nevada landscape to capture vivid moments of insight, grief, emotional angst etc etc. "Winner's Casino," the song, is about needing to be 'left alone' (to heal?) Winner's Casino is a real casino in Winnemucca, Nevada. "Glison Street" offers a glimpse at lost love/ small town relationship. "Glison Street also exists. After listening to this album several times, I wanted to make the trek north, back to Winnemucca (where my car blew up in 1971 and I was left stranded.) With gas prices soaring, I don't need to literally hit the road, I can just turn up the volume. The band's sound is classified as wavering somewhere between cowpunk and alt-country 'slow core.' That's right. The combination of marrying this sound with Nevada short-story is compelling and emotionally satisfying.

It's hard to write an album review when you find yourself in love with certain songs. I would hold true everything the above reviews say about this album. "Northline" is brilliant but the absolute gem on this album is "Western Skyline" - perhaps one of the best "alt-country" songs ever written!!!

This CD reverberates with feelings and memories of being isolated and alone, walking along a 2-lane highway, trying to hitch a ride to a new destination. This album is much different than RF's previous albums, and perhaps not as good as the amazing "Miles From", however, the music and lyrics catch the listener's ear and pulls him in like a good novel. As with most of Willy Vlautin's songs, all the songs here tell a story. Most of them entail normal people put though extraordinary circumstances. In "Northern Skyline", a man holds his friend on the side of the road after a car wreck, as he makes promises to the dying man of "glowing light and beautiful women" before he is finally "set free." "Northline" tells the story of a former skinhead girlfriend of the storyteller who had fallen into the traps of her other boyfriend's messed up belief system and disappeares from the narrator's life. Perhaps the most disturbing, yet beautiful song is, "5 Degrees Below Zero" in which the protagonist, in a fit of rage about his life and his surroundings, stops the bus he is on in the middle of nowhere so he can walk out into the freezing elements to his imminent death. RF is not only the engaging lyrics of Mr. Vlautin, but also the incredible pedal steel playing of Paul Brainard, whose simple, but tasty style completes the feeling of each song perfectly. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes eery, Brainard's playing infuses the music with a touch of old-style country and new-psychedelica. The only thing missing from "Winnemucca" is the country punk that it has shown on all of its previous releases. Most of the songs are relaxed, and they are meant to do so...still some of the bands finer moments in the past have been from its Minutemen or X influences.