ALL
MUSIC GUIDE
By
Thom Jurek
March 2009
WESTERN BELL
Guitarist
and songwriter Kelly Joe Phelps has always traveled an iconoclastic,
enigmatic path. Since the release of his debut album, Lead
Me On in 1995 on the tiny Burnside imprint, through his amazing
Rykodisc recordings from the late part of that decade and the middle
of the first part of this century, he's wound his way through covers
and his own songs with a particular sense of place and rough-hewn elegance. Western
Bell is Phelps' first record since 2006, issued on the Vancouver
indie Black Hen Music.
Norman & Nancy Blake once
released an album with their Rising
Fawn String Ensemble called Original
Underground Music from the Mysterious South, comprised of folk
songs, Civil War era reels, and dance tunes that felt utterly out of
time and space because they were so basic and unadorned, so completely
uncluttered by anything but a direct attempt to play this music as the
seemingly forgotten and alien construct it was in the early 1980s. Phelps'
album, it can be paraphrased, is "original underground music from the
mysterious (North)west." Just as Loren
MazzaCane Connors mutated his love of the Delta blues into an avant-guarde
hybrid all his own -- often barely recognizable as blues but clearly
based in it -- Phelps has, on Western Bell, offered listeners
a complete synthesis of his musical vision as a guitarist. This is a
completely instrumental collection of original tunes played on acoustic
six- and 12-string guitars, lap slide guitar, and bells. Musically, Phelps
combines his love of Piedmont style picking, early 20th century Texas,
Louisiana, and deep Delta blues with his love of decidedly Western notions
of folk song and Rocky Mountain mountain music. Even this description
is poor. The reason is that Phelps infuses his own music with such comfort,
space, and gentleness in his playing that what comes out is his own inviting
but subjective history of blues as it has evolved in his spirit. Some
of these songs are hummable, such as the opening title track, a waltz
with some odd bits of slightly dissonant harmonics tossed in near the
end that add dimension. "Blowing Dust 40 Miles" is skeletal, with slide
and fingerpicking styles varying and moving through and against one another,
trying to hesitantly and somewhat tensely decide if there is a song in
the improvisation, all the while pulling the listener deeper into the
ghostliness of the music itself. "Hometown with Melody," played on
a 12-string, sounds like a combination lullaby and travel song played
as a tentative reminiscence. "The Jenny Spin," played on the lap slide,
has a minimal melody, articulated through a fragmented mode with bells
hovering in the distance to ground the tune because it's barely there
-- despite some amazingly fluid playing by Phelps -- and might float
away. "Blue Daughter Tattoo" combines the abundance of Phelps' fingerstyle
expertise with a bass-string driven walk through western cowboy melody,
country blues, and logging camp song forms. Western Bell is
among the most unique acoustic guitar recordings out there today. It's
not a superpicker exercise, and it doesn't sound like any of the past
or current acoustic guitar icons; Phelps moves it his own way. Here he
plays as if in dialogue with some unseen entity, telling stories on the
instrument that only he knows the meaning of -- or he's asking questions,
trying to discover for himself. Cryptic, hushed, confoundingly beautiful,
this is a brilliant, deeply moving work by an artist who has created
a new language on the acoustic guitar, culled from the discontinued speech
fragments of American music's own mysterious past.
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