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Album Review
by SaschaS
1-3-2005
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| Willy Mason: 'Where The Humans...' dream |
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Willy Mason: 'Where the Humans Eat'
(Virgin)
Willy Mason: Sideways from Martha’s Vineyard…
The recently self-exiled ‘Dr Gonzo’ - Dr Hunter S. Thompson had a maxim, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro”, that aptly summed up his unpredictable, uncontrollable and extreme life. To that end, the good Doc also believed that you should know a lot, if not all, of what one is writing about. His life’s dissertations being - living-to-maximum and opiates.
Nowadays one feels that the requirement is geek-chic because the culture appears to be created by people who’ve been isolated by [within?] cyber revolution. Sure, writers - everything starts with an idea jotted down - do work in solitude but they used to read whilst the current ‘artisans’ appear to prefer computa-games. There are exceptions and Willy Mason is one of them.
The 20-year-old from Martha’s Vineyard and his debut album ‘Where The Humans Eat’ can be classed as ‘indie-folk’ but that’s far too narrow for his expressive talent. Although he follows the tradition of singer-songwriters’ brotherhood he sidesteps troubadour-zone for takes that often defy easy categorisation.
Martha’s Vineyard, a middle class playground/holiday spot for New Yorkers, is certainly not a place to surely and expertly prepare one for urban living but he takes Americana for her [rough] neck and drags it into urbanity. From the opening ‘Gotta Keep Movin’’ it travels the sonic fantastic where no discerning pattern emerges. Each song is its own entity, sounding familiar and alien at the same, combining redundant and creative into a seamless items.
The essence of Mason is usage of trad-basis for song settings that equally come from blues fields, cattle ranches, mid-Western farms, streets of New Orleans, [enhanced] sunshine of California as well as New York’s grime and decay. For all its pastoral undertones, it appears this disc reflect that ‘… Humans Eat’ out mostly on the mean, steel‘n‘concrete surrounded streets…
String-section adds an eerie backing to the title track of an album that is an intimate affair, an insight of ourselves as much as the artist… His vocal is not too distinguished but, by the same token, you can’t make a straightforward comparison; perhaps Neil Young on a diet of country-blues?
The fact is that Willy Mason doesn’t vandalise anybody’s body of work for his career but build on the ‘shoulders of giants’. He keeps instrumentation minimal, his vocals clear and easy-to-understand, painting imagery that takes in all manifestations of living. It may be that Martha’s Vineyard is not be a bad place to grow up because you can observe decadent city dwellers [Broadway-by-waves?] as well as fields, sea and have plenty of fresh…
‘Oxygen’ should be a huge hit for this man whose concluding song may be autobiographical: ‘21st Century Boy’. And a ‘boy’ who finds a place for Dostoevsky in his lyrics, can hardly do wrong in our daily toil that is 24/7 filled by meat parade of ‘stars’.
8/10
SaschaS
1-3-2005
Willy Mason’s album ‘Where The Humans Eat’ is available now on Virgin
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