The Wynntown Marshals – Big Ideas

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Big Ideas, the latest offering from The Wynntown Marshals, was originally begun in 2018. While the intervening years have brought line-up changes and pandemic delays, the Edinburgh Americana outfit’s fourth album is finally here, and it’s a beaut.

The core Byrds and Bruce influences remain, the latter notably so as the album opener New Millennium (surely that’s Roy Bittan on piano!), finds them taking a drive down Thunder Road, a song about finding closure but also trying to rekindle the flame. Then come those jangling guitars on the title track, a number about oversharing on social media and thinking before you speak, and the line about “another random act of blindness/Compounding everything we’ve missed this year” is clearly a pandemic reference.

Nostalgia, love and loss emerge as recurring themes, the wistful, keys-backed, Tourist In My Hometown pretty much summed up by the title, opening in 1985 and big dreams then forwarding 30 years, still four suitcases just a different car. Iain Sloan’s pedal steel opens the near six-minute The Pocket, a slow-paced song inspired by the battle for Stalingrad sung by one of the German soldiers abandoned by their leaders, bunched together in a foxhole at Christmas thinking of home and awaiting death. But then Learn To Lose picks the tempo back up with a country rock groove and more feelings of regret and longing for what was, be that a relationship or a friendship that was fated to end, the chorus advising, “you’ve got to learn to lose in your own way” and with a decided vintage West Coast instrumental break. The lyric speaks about “the missing part of me”,  the phrase picked up for the title of The Missing Me, another number about wanting to start over and how being “lost in isolation” is better than being alone, which marks the loading of the slower, more ballad-like track in the second half and introducing a new touchstone that recalls fellow Scots Deacon Blue.

That feel extends to Keys Found In Snow with its organ intro and pedal steel and piano interplay, poetically conjuring the end of a relationship with the title note left in the window and a beer can and solitary shoe on the front lawn. Then jangling guitars return alongside Hammond organ and harmonica for the shimmeringly wonderful mid-west country rock Disappointment, which sketches the “slow bleed out” of the 9-to-5  life in middle America where “it’s a fine line between what you get/And what you want”, frontman Keith Benzie delivering the guitar solo.

There’s a funky country edge  intro to the penultimate slow swaylong Treat Me Right, another addition to the library of songs about the uncertainties of the heart and, caught off-guard by his feelings, the narrator wondering, “was I holding out for the real thing/Or just another convincing fake?”

It ends in a far folksier style, the line about being a  pupil of Pollard possible an obscure reference to the former Cambridge Professor of Education Andrew Pollard, who holds an honorary doctorate from Edinburgh University,  on Full Moon, Fallow Heart, hope shining through to light the hard path where “only platitudes remain” as we remember our greatest failures but, while cynically saying “wake me when it gets to the good part”, it closes with the wry acceptance that “Nothing in this world is ever perfect/Really think I like things that way”.

On the release of their 2010 debut, The Wynntown Marshals were hailed as Europe’s best Americana band. Nothing here suggests anything’s changed.

Order via Bandcamp: https://wynntownmarshals.bandcamp.com/album/big-ideas