The Wreckage, the debut solo album by the frontman of Virginia rock outfit Lord Nelson (no, me neither) is custom built for those who can’t resist a Petty-esque Mid-West nasal drawl, jangling guitar and alt-country vintage college radio hooks, opening with ‘A Southeast State’, a reflective song about familial history (“that long gravel lane where you learned to drive/Grinding gears to Springsteen the sunlight in the pines/Waking in the city slowly growing numb/Waking up to sirens wondering what you have become”) , home and mortality (“She talks about her parents like one day they’ll be back/So when she went to meet them on that August day/We stood around the parlor and stared out at the bay”) complete with lengthy atmospheric guitar solo.
Written as the album’s rocker, ‘American Radio’ with its punchy drums and ringing guitars is another reflective track, conjuring growing up in rural Virginia where the most excitement you could look forward to was driving around at night, gasoline and gravel, smoking weed and listening to the radio, thinking there must be something more out there (“how I miss the driving around with you/The smell of spring and your perfume/And everything we thought we knew/Is never coming true”).
Riding a steady drum beat and tumbling guitar chords, ‘Ghost Country’ has a darker feel to match its subject matter, the contrast between the landscape beauty of Appalachia and the hardships of those who live there, suffering opioid addiction, inequality and crippling financial burdens with no escape in sight (“I walk the street with two dollars stores/One stop light and the little Texas bar/Not many of us shadows still around /Some stayed clean and some ain’t trying/Empty church and empty field/Empty sky here where I kneel/These flowers aren’t but the pain is real”) only “desperation and Appalachian rust/Left clinging to the wind” and while “somewhere out there is a world where people still grow old/Here the chemicals explode/The river’s running with kepone”.
Shimmery 12 strings colour ‘Dancing On A Razor’s Edge’, a song relating to the loss of his mother when he was young (“Jeans were hanging on the line it’s almost dinner time when I hear my name/That patrolman radio in the kitchen playing low with the news of the day/We were children in the woods running from the good the hurt and pain”) and trying to make sense of the present (“Nothing like a mother’s love it’s delicate and tough/it knows no cage/When it’s taken from a boy turning up the noise turning up the rage/Scars they never really heal but allow us to reveal a stitch in time/Now I’m always looking back running on the tracks, your hand in mine”).
Much of the album deals with the hardballs life throws as we try either to avoid or handle them, the title track being a case in point as, drawing on observations of what friends were going through while trying to pretend nothing was wrong, comes with such lines as “Laughing hard and blowing smoke/Accidents and ER trips a sadness you never spoke/Prescription pills and doctors notes” and “started going hard when you turned 15/Took your whiskey with grenadine/Never was a problem until you watched her leave” as he notes “You don’t need to believe in heaven to know you feel like hell”. There is hope though and while “None of us are getting out alive… somewhere in these shadows we learn how to survive”.
Loss also informs arguably the album’s stand out number, ‘Brass Angels’, which has a Gram-like air of cosmic country and takes the perspective of the one left behind when a cheating relationship ends (“From the sheets to the ceiling it was only laughter and rain/We’d leave the widows open and let the wind rattle the panes/You’d wrap your arms around me and said we’d never change/But the morning comes and it’s that empty feeling again”) with its earworm chorus “There were little brass angels hanging over the bed/We made love and they’d go dancing round our heads/Now you’re back in his arms, I’m standing here in the door/And those angels don’t dance much anymore”.
Taking a similar emotional path, a high lonesome keening sets the mood for the slow walking ‘Heavy As Heaven’ (“You shot first and waited for the blood to land/Giving up, was never in your plan/Now you say you want a whole new start”), the pandemic experience adding weight to the bittersweet lines “You said you seen the good ones all go first/Leaving us, shuffling round this dirt/We’re broken and we’re damaged and we’re cursed/The best of us can still push against the worst/So heal me now, I’m in need of stitches… You got heart that feels a great depression/But I know it’s hard/When you’re heavy as heaven”.
While more musically upbeat with an intro like a peal of bells, ‘Forks Of Buffalo’, the title from a road sign and a derelict building he’d regularly pass, is nevertheless another that talks of shattered dreams and hopes (“We were never promised roses/Just acres and acres of pine/Now the laurels aren’t blooming/we’re running out of time/I always gave you both my hands/Calloused and covered in dirt/The only thing they ever held was this world of hurt”) but while “Giving up would be so easy so little left to lose”, it’s built on a call of not wanting to be that house (“Don’t ever let me go/Down to the forks of the buffalo/Don’t ever let me go down again/In that howling wind”).
You really can’t have too much melancholy on an album like The Wreckage, and, featuring fiddle and Casey Wayne McAllister on piano (taking it to an instrumental close), there’s a heady dose with the slow bluesy relationship unravelling country ballad ‘No One Breaks A Heart Like You’ , before, with shades of George Harrison guitar, it ends with ‘Whole Damn World’ and a crack of light streaming through the darkness (“I see the heron flying over/And a new moon on the rise/You put your head on my shoulder/Slowly closing your eyes… Everything I ever wanted/And the trouble that it brings/As long as you’re here beside me/I’ll be feeling like a king”). Like Dave Edmunds you may be crawling from the wreckage, but you’re not trapped among the steel and “Nothing but the whole damn world is gonna get you down”.
Mike Davies
Artist’s website: www.kaicrowegetty.com
‘Heavy As Heaven’ – official video:
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