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Following his collaboration with Calexico and the recent EP trilogy featuring edited tasters and demos, Dean Owens will release the full and finished version of his new album, Spirit Ridge, on 14th February. He’s backed by the Italian musicians who comprise The Stone Buffalo Band on various instruments, including lap steel, mellotron, piano, drums, guitars and double bass.
It opens with two hitherto unheard tracks, stormy sound effects introducing the measured pace of Eden Is Here, which, with tremulous guitar backing and minimal instrumentation foregrounding his meditative vocals, is a contemplative tribute to the area around Crinale amid the hills of the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, its translation as ridge giving the album its title. That’s followed, the pace picking up, with Spirito, an instrumental with Morricone guitar echoes and brass notes before the five-minute unedited version of My Beloved Hills, the album’s title source thematic anchor of home referencing the landscape around producer Don Antonio’s studio and home with strings and trumpet by Calexico’s Tom Hagerman and Martin Wenk, respectively.
Continuing that focus on the healing power of nature, Light This World previously appeared on the Trilogy EP (a review of which can be found here) alongside Spirit Of Us, an early song for his wife and (at the time unborn) daughter that features Calexico’s John Convertino and references It’s A Wonderful Life, while, following the EP demo, The Buzzard And The Crow, inspired by living in the Scottish Borders and imagining the world seen from the birds’ viewpoint, now comes in its full glory with hollow, rumbling drums, sonorous bluesy guitar and haunted, slightly distorted vocals.
The all-new Burn It All, another bluesy number with a steady walking beat rhythm, funky guitars, sax and an undercurrent of menace (“When it comes to that time/You know what you have to do/Gather up all those letters/Those pages of lies/Throw them all on the fire/Watch the sparks fill the sky”) was inspired by novels set in the Deep South and the dispossessed and displaced seeking escape (“Don’t tell a soul where you’re going/Take the back roads tonight/While the winter moon is full and glowing/You’ll make the border by daylight”).
Another new track, Face The Storm (The Buffalo), was written while touring in Wyoming and Montana, Owens taking an excursion into Custer State Park in South Dakota to herds of bison, their resilience in the face of harsh weather serving to ground the song’s theme of stoicism and willpower (“when others turn and run/You stand and face into the storm”).
Having previously appeared in demo form, the moody, sparer, dobro-shaded Sinner Of Sinners unfolds a dark tale about a dark soul (“I’m a liar and a thief/I’ll take anything I want from you/I’ll rob you blind and then I’ll lie straight to your face…I’m a world of pain and hate/I keep waking up in places you don’t want to see”) orphaned by murder and hanging, whose mere presence quiets the birds.
Also new, Wall Of Death is a musically uptempo, brass parping, piano-pounding big production number about tackling the black dog of depression (“Create an alias, leave town and join the circus/Better now than not at all/Be a lion tamer, clown, not so nervous/Ride the wall of death until I fall/The black dog is dead, long live the black dog/The beast who anchors me/My best friend, constant companion/Seen by nobody”), the mention of the lion tamer pre-empting the final slow and steady walking rhythm bluesy track Tame The Lion, a nod to an Italian ancestor, Ambrose Salvona and about how the souls of those passed still walk among us, again expanded from the EP edit into almost six-minutes.
That’s preceded by one final new number, the twangy guitar, slow march melancholic A Divine Tragedy, a song about two friends going through a difficult divorce (“I’m drowning among/The debris/It’s all falling apart/Can’t go on like this/Now there’s no heart/In our kiss/I just don’t feel the same/I just can’t feel the rain”), his voice and delivery conjuring Celtic soul as the track fades away into the ether.
An atmospheric and evocative work, I suspect it now brings to a close the Mexican/Italian-inspired musical period that’s characterised his recent albums, so it’ll be interesting to see if his Scottish roots return to the surface next time around.
Pre-Order:
UK Customers: https://deanowens.bandcamp.com/track/the-buzzard-and-the-crow
EU Customers via https://continentalrecordservices.bandcamp.com/album/spirit-ridge
