Americana often conjures up words like psychedelic or cosmic, but the form rarely offers such a way-out hue as experienced here; Wes Tirey Sings Selected Works Of Billy The Kid is a true one-off.
The legend of Billy The Kid permeates a thread through Western popular culture, especially in the country music arena, but also spreads to pop acts like Billy Joel, who have built grand cinematic ballads around his outlaw story and even Bob Dylan, who of course acted in the movie ‘Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid’ as well as recording the soundtrack album. Understandably, from a drama point of view, these tributes tend to focus on the gunfighting rebel aspect of his life, the man who is believed to have killed twenty-one people before he died in 1881. Having seen his notoriety grow via increased press coverage, he killed the Lincoln County Sheriff and was captured for the crime shortly after by Sheriff Pat Garrett. His final weeks were high on incident too, with Billy The Kid escaping jail, murdering two deputies in the process, before finally being tracked down and killed by Garrett himself at Fort Sumner. The potential for artistic storytelling in film and music is all too obvious, making Wes Tirey‘s contribution to the cannon all the more unique and worthy.
On Wes Tirey – Wes Tirey Sings Selected Works Of Billy The Kid, Wes presents seven works, not songs but works, as each track does not have a title beyond Work 1, Work 2, etc. The two instrumental tracks are similarly numbered and titled without fanfare or colour. That is not to say that this album is lacking in any way, but entirely in keeping with the hard-faced realism in which the texts are delivered. Work 1 could not be starker, an emotionless Tirey stepping inside the voice of Billy The Kid as he reads out a chronological list of those whose lives he has ended in cold blood. You do not need to put a flowery title on something like this; the content alone vibrates with grim yet electric detail. That is where the meat on the bone lies for this record, not in a glib search for answers or moralising, neither does it reach for dynamic sensationalism, but rather in Wes’s commitment to calling in this rebel spirit from the ether, breathing in the air and surroundings from another age and rubbing against those rough textures a while.
The wonderous element of these tracks is that, rather than plucking the words and images from the pages of Michael Ondaatje’s exploratory novel issued in 1970 (titled ‘The Collected Works Of Billy The Kid’) and aiming to present them in a modern context, with 21st-century audio dynamics to the fore, Wes has gone so far back the rolling ball swallows notions of ‘retro’ whole and laughs in the face of ‘vintage’. This is something else entirely, a ghostly experience transmitting in from another place and time. You picture a dusty, empty saloon surrounded by billowing trees and torn fabric, a sad foreboding voice testifying from a gramophone player in the corner that has no record rotating nor any other sign of life in the vicinity. And such is the hypnotic manner in which Wes delivers these sermon-like works, sometimes a spoken recital devoid of melody, but even when sung still a haunted growl, you must conclude that the chink of light breaking through from another age effect was exactly his intention. Even the acoustic guitar work is filtered among a rumbling haze of semi-distortion and lo-fi aesthetics. It harks back to the days when recording was far more focused on the sound of an environment than capturing the perfect clean sound of an instrument. This collection does so much more than that, apparently conquering the mysteries of time travel by reaching back to taste, feel and live the outlaw-ridden plains of late nineteenth-century USA. Americana often conjures up words like psychedelic or cosmic, but the form rarely offers such a way-out hue as experienced here; Wes Tirey Sings Selected Works Of Billy The Kid is a true one-off.
Order the album here: https://westirey-suncru.bandcamp.com/album/wes-tirey-sings-selected-works-of-billy-the-kid