Song, by Toad

Willard Grant Conspiracy – Pilgrim Road

I took the chance to chat to Robert Fisher about this album after his recent show at the Queen’s Hall, just to try and get a little perspective on the album, and to catch up since his last visit to Edinburgh.

The album to which this is the natural successor, Regard the End, is the record that got me into the Willard Grant Conspiracy to begin with.  There is a raging grief about much of that album, which is replaced by just plain raging in the follow up, Let it Roll.  Fisher never saw Let it Roll as the direct follow up to Regard the End that he intended Pilgrim Road to be.

So from a death-facing album to one that looks square at spirituality.  It’s not the religious record many have described it as, and Robert seems quite irritated by this particular description.  In his own words, it’s about spirituality – about that need most of us seem to have in us to believe in things other than those we can see with our own eyes.  Songs with titles like The Great Deceiver make it pretty obvious that for all it uses a lot of religious language, this is not a Lord, I Bin Saved record at all, but on that contains all sort of stories of divine dislocation and the slightly warped relationships people seem to have with their gods and their beliefs at the moment.

Musically, much of the ferocity of Let it Roll and the wrench of Regard the End has been replaced by a richer, more glutinous sound.  This sound is the result of a collaboration with Scottish composer Malcolm Lindsay and is Fisher’s first work that involved arranging an entire orchestra.  Embracing this new way of working is something he clearly feels is important, in order to keep him refreshed and challenged and to stave off that middle-aged atrophying of the musical bones that claims so many great songwriters.

There’s an interesting digression we nearly get into, were it not for time being short, about how you stay fresh as an artist and how you keep the intensity inside you that produces intensity in your art at a time in your life and career when most people tend to be doing to opposite.  This may have to wait until an Autumn Toad Session, which he rather surprisingly suggested he might be interested in doing.

There’s something slightly choking about this album.  My drunken co-interviewing interloper (a fan who insisted on staying and joining in – it was quite funny actually, and fortunately he wasn’t really a pain at all) compared it to Mojave, a really early WGC record, and I can see that, just about.  It feels like death in many ways, that slow constriction of the airways and dreamlike drift into an eerie, mysterious place.  Like those dreams where you can’t move quickly and darkness closes in, but your brain still maintains a sort of detached, struggling awareness of the increasing failure of the senses.

I doesn’t always make for the most enjoyable listen, funnily enough, with songs like Miracle on 8th Street being slightly overwhelmed by the grip of the music, something of which it never quite breaks free.  At other times, on tracks like the absolutely brilliant Painter Blue, it leads Fisher into some of his most creative song arrangements yet.  I still don’t know about this album, if I’m honest.  There are some really great bits, and some bits that don’t quite seem to take off, but what I would a I say about the album as a whole?  That might take me six months to decide.

Willard Grant Conspiracy – Painter Blue
Willard Grant Conspiracy – Vespers

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