Will Stewart – Way Gone
Cornelius Chapel Records – 8 May 2020
A mini-album follow up to 2018’s County Seat (reviewed here) finds the Birmingham Alabama singer-songwriter-guitarist, Will Stewart, riding the Southern gothic trail with six tracks. The album opens with an appropriately jittery guitar accompaniment to Southern Raphael, the tale of a late-night chance encounter between strangers in a dive bar, the resonator twang coiling the tension as its heads towards a musically noisy and lyrically ambiguous climax.
Slowing it down, lost soul narrative River Child has a lazing everglades country feel with brushed snares and aching pedal steel, the jangling (Don’t Go Back To) Rockville REM bustle of All Over Again serving as a bridge between that and the moody, confessionally sung, border country strum and piano backed Stowaway. It ends with two near five-minute numbers, first up being the slow indolent Youngian lope of Night God, a doom-soaked account of a shattered life unravelling with the melancholic guitar solo adding deeper gravitas to his anguished hopelessness. And, finally, comes the spare, atmospheric low rumble of Cruel Sky, erupting midway into a brief end of days storm of feedback before ebbing away into the void.
His name may not yet be embedded in the wider collective consciousness of Americana, but this is a welcome reminder of a smouldering talent charting an inexorable path to the recognition and acclaim he deserves.
https://soundcloud.com/w_stewart/southern-raphael
https://www.willstewartmusic.com/
Photo Credit: Wes Frazier