Dean Owens – El Tiradito (Album Review)

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El Tiradito (The Curse of Sinner’s Shrine) marks the next stage of Dean Owens’s hugely atmospheric collaboration with iconic Latin rockers Calexico. With Owens tapping into his inner Morricone, all it needs now is a screenplay.

Situated in the Old Barrio area of Downtown Tucson, Arizona, El Tiradito is a Catholic shrine dedicated to a sinner buried in unconsecrated ground. Legend tells how, in the 1870s, 18-year-old ranch hand Juan Oliveras married the daughter of his sheep-rancher employer but also had a secret affair with his mother-in-law. On discovering this, the husband chased Juan into the street of Barrio Viejo and murdered him before fleeing to  Mexico, his wife hanging herself out of grief. Looking to return to his ranch to gather his flock, he’s attacked by Apaches, stabbed, scalped, tied to a cactus and left for dead, his body is found by a passing stagecoach and buried in Nogales. Meanwhile, back in Tucson, refused a church burial, Juan has been buried on the street where he died while his widow, finding herself pregnant, ties a rope around her neck and throws herself down the ranch’s well, and is buried under a nearby tree. Today, visitors to Juan’s shrine come to make wishes asking for healing of the heart and to leave mementoes of lost loved ones.

All of this served as the basis for Sinner’s Shrine, the album Owens recorded with Calexico, both in Tucson and long distance, four tracks of which had been previously released on his Desert Trilogy EPs. The other eight from the same sessions (which didn’t make the album) and the 3 EPs (now sold out) are gathered together here in response to fan demand, and reviews of them can be found elsewhere on this site. They’re accompanied by two bonus tracks, sparse solo home demo blueprints of La Lomita and The Hopeless Ghosts.

But that’s not all. This is a double CD, the second disc being an instrumental soundtrack for an imagined Western about the story behind the shrine, eight numbers featuring Calexico’s John Convertino and Martin Wenk alongside Naïm Amor, Tom Hagerman and Owens’ former Felsons bandmate Kevin McGuire.

Opening with the dry, dusty sound of crickets chirping, El Tiradito sets the musical template with moody guitars, laid-back percussion and the lonesome whistling associated with Morricone and Serge Leone’s Westerns. The pacing varies, hitting more uptempo marks on the widescreen A Bullet And A Silver Coin with its marching beat, electronic effects and brass, How The West Was Stolen with its wordless vocals and drums-driven, trumpets sounding, guitar twanging The Final Ride before it suddenly slips into a windblown, haunted fade.

The others, Canyon Without A Name, The Rain That Never Lands and the mournful Weeping Skulls (which has a similar quiet fade), are slower and more funereal; the collection ends with Ride The Hanging Road, which shifts from doomy, echoing drums and castanets slow march to a surging clanging percussion gallop, again with wordless voices as the imaginary end credits roll. 

Hugely atmospheric; all it needs now is for Walter Hill to come up with a screenplay to go with it. Having effectively drawn a line in the desert sand, Owens is currently working on his 10^th solo album, to be recorded in Italy and released next year. It’ll be interesting to hear where the musical road map takes him next.

Head on over to Bandcamp and grab it (Digital/CD).