Cowboys in Tangier was recorded in summer 2024 but is only recently released. It’s worth the wait – there’s some neat playing and clever song writing on the nine tracks of this album.
From Manchester, The Beautiful Failures has eight members. The vocals are shared between Cathy Williams and Warren Gaskell, who is also the main songwriter and one of the guitarists. Their two voices play off each other wonderfully. Rick Lucas adds further skill on guitar and a band sound, at times delicate or intricate, at times full on, is completed with drums, keyboards, bass, banjo and pedal steel.
The album opens with ‘Stay At Ease’ a classic relationship-themed song. The second track, ‘Don’t Think You Own Me’ is another relationship song and tells the tale you’d expect from its title. It’s very nicely done – country picking, steel guitar, flares on the keyboards and a ninety-second long conclusion where the two voices trade “Don’t think you own me” separately and together. You can hear why the band describe their style as representing “a particularly British style of alt-country”.
The title track, ‘Cowboys In Tangier’, is radio-friendly-splendid and ‘Two Wheels’ banjos its way into your consciousness on a bike song. There’s a couple of splendid lines, “A car’s just heavy metal, but a bike is rock and roll” and a refrain of, “Four wheels move the body, two wheels move the soul”. In amongst the more internationally celebrated Easy Rider and Steve McQueen lines, there’s also a reference to Devil’s Bridge, which any biker in the north west will know.
‘Dirty Hands’ is the other track I’d highlight, a song about hard work, hard-earned money – and love, “These dirty hands keep getting older/Sometimes these hands turn black and blue/But each time you look over your shoulder/These dirty hands look after you”. With its gentler vocal and its steeled and keyboard steeled emotion, it will also explain what is meant by a “a particularly British style of alt-country”.
The album only lasts a little over half an hour, but it’s sequenced like a belter of a concert, building to thumping drum and the flickerings of an Americana-ish shredding guitar for ‘Broken Kiss’ and ‘Run Into These Arms’, the final two tracks. The latter of these could have been written to be an encore as its tempo shifts from quiet keyboard and guitar to driving full band and then a concluding slow, begging, request to “run into these arms” to finish the album.
There’s no indication of live gigs that I can find, which is a shame. Enjoy the album.
Mike Wistow
Website: https://www.thebeautifulfailures.com
‘Cowboys In Tangier’:
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