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Critical
Writings
Articles and Reviews: MUSIC
Thirteen Cities by Richmond Fontaine (Décor)
The seventh album from one of this writer’s
favourite Americana bands sees them decamp from Portland
to Tuscon, to record at Wavelab Studios, favourite
haunt of Calexico and Giant Sand, both of whom guest
here. At first sight it might seem like an upheaval
to swap the greenest of states for the desert, but
then you remember that chief wordsmith Willy Vlautin
grew up in Reno. And a species of psychogeography
is indeed at work here, the CD booklet even coming
with a map of the desolate south western locus of
the towns of the title.
As ever, Vlautin’s lyrical concerns are with
the lost, the lonely, the rootlessly marginalised
– like the characters of his novel The Motel
Life – drifters who, as one of the stone
classics here, ‘St. Ides, Parked Cars, and Other
People’s Homes’ has it, are …so
unsure of life you never fit/Spend your life giving
every one the slip. ‘Westward Ho’
is even a litany of sorts, comprised of motel names,
the narrator concluding, Motel life ain’t
much of a life, and a motel ain’t much of a
home/But I found out years ago that a house ain’t
either.
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The change of scene has lent a more
overtly political context to Vlautin’s work, sounded
by opening track, the instrumental ‘The Border’.
The subsequent ‘I Fell Into Painting Houses in
Phoenix, Arizona’ and ‘The Disappearance
of Ray Norton’ are both concerned with Mexican
economic emigration, the former told from the perspective
of a man who left his decorating job because his boss
didn’t pick up an illegal who had worked for five
days and hadn’t been paid, the later a tale of
a neighbour boy who has become involved with tattooed
skinheads, due to his hatred of Mexicans taking over
his town.
If the landscape has become sparser, the arrangements
are richer, in comparison with 2005’s stripped
down masterpiece, The Fitzgerald, Paul Brainard’s
pedal steel and Jacob Valenzuela’s trumpet in
particular lending widescreen textures. Above all, there
is the simple but not simplistic, heartfelt but never
sentimental, eloquent if sometimes maudlin poetry, expressing
Vlautin’s vision of decent people just trying
to get by. Funny how the best music coming out of America
is not being made by rich, thick celebrities like the
odious Paris Hilton, but by and about ordinary folks.
Once again, the real thing.
First published in Magill, April 2007
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