Willard Grant Conspiracy- Paper Covers Stone

Mon 20th Sep, 2010 in Music Reviews

Willard Grant Conspiracy is a loose collective of musicians surrounding singer/songwriter and mercurial talent Robert Fisher who have been around in one form or another since 1995. In that time they’ve released eight albums, four live albums, and two EPs, and on album number nine have revisited this imposing back catalogue to re-record some of their older songs in a more intimate, stripped-back style.

I’ll confess at the outset that I am not familiar with the full WGC back catalogue. I listened to their last album, Pilgrim Road, a couple of times, but couldn’t tell you much about it. What I can tell you, though, is that WGC do one of my favourite covers – a version of Dylan’s Ballad of a Thin Man.

Dylan wrote it about a British music journalist who kept asking questions that merely served to reveal his fundamental ignorance of everything Dylan was about. Dylan’s version is quietly vitriolic, reducing this “Mr. Jones” to nothing and then dismissing him with a flick of his lyrics. But the WGC version turns that casual dismissal into white-hot rage, turning Dylan’s curious misfits emblematic of Mr. Jones’ confusion (the geek, the one-eyed midget, the sword-swallower) into a parade of horrors intended to terrify. And as the violins squeal in the background, and the guitars churn and pummel your ear’s Mr. Jones, Fisher roars Dylan’s lyrics with so much force, so much seething hatred, you wonder how anybody could possibly withstand it. It’s such an intense performance that it makes Dylan’s original seem quite tame in comparison – something only a handful of covers have ever managed to do.

Sadly, though, it is exactly this intensity that is missing from Paper Covers Stone. There’s no doubting Fisher’s songwriting, or indeed his voice – a rich baritone that sounds at times like Johnny Cash, at others like Nick Cave. And some of the arrangements of these songs are absolutely gorgeous, with strings, muted trumpets and quiet choirs creating a terrific sense of intimacy, of being right there in the room with them. But the album as a whole runs for a little over an hour, by which time it all starts to sound a little bit alike.

All that having been said, I can see that for long-time fans of WGC these versions could be indispensable. And it certainly makes me want to go back and listen to the original recordings, to see if they have that little bit of extra oomph that they desperately need.