Artist: West End Motel
Label: Warner Bros. Records
Release: 2012
Runtime: 30:22
Rating: 3.6/5
Say the name Brent Hinds and plenty of you will instantly think of juicy, prog-spiced metal, but the raw, megaton stampede of the megastar outfit Mastodon isn’t all there is to this gifted guitarist. After all, Hinds had a musical life before he ever teamed up with Sanders and company, and part of that still-living spectrum of the past are bands like Fiend Without A Face, the creakily sinister Mister Heavenly, and last but not least the oddball among his musical excursions into parallel universes, West End Motel.
Somewhere I read a juicy comparison that likens Hinds’ preoccupation with all those side projects, on top of his undoubtedly heavy and demanding work in Mastodon, to a dude who keeps in touch with his high school and college sweethearts even after he’s tied the knot with a model, a supermodel, a Miss World. I don’t know, but there’s clearly some truth in it, and more than two decades of acquaintance, contact and work, which is how long West End Motel’s history runs, had to leave a mark somewhere. It’s a band where the notorious Hinds melted together with pianist and guitarist Mike Shina, singer Tom Cheshire, bassist Stiff Penalty and Ben Thrower, plus a few more poets, vagabonds, lovers of aimless partying, mild stonedness and cough syrup (which the guys diligently abused somewhere under the bridges of Atlanta in 1993, when the story also begins), and the main thread tying it all together was at first an acoustic guitar, rhythmic banging on empty containers and noodling out harmonies on kids’ keyboards. The main subject is a man weighed down by everyday troubles, the music in all its simplicity is unforced and honest, and the whole thing mirrors a close friendship between people who love a good time, a good party, while also loving a bit of weirdness and unusual musical rambling about love, loss and laughter-filled happenings that only they themselves fully understand.
One spin of Only Time Can Tell , released last year on Warner, is enough for me to say with confidence that, despite Hinds’ ringing name, anyone expecting yet another replica of the Mastodon sound will be disappointed. Closer to the truth, and to a burst of joy, will be those who expected from Hinds a mix of Talking Heads, a thoroughly sloshed Nick Cave and Tom Waits, because that, in short, is what this strange trip down the backroads describes, taken by a man who is otherwise bound heart and soul to the sludgy substrate of the progressively ambitious and seemingly boundlessly inventive Mastodon. Only Time Can Tell is at first glance an easygoing patio record that at the same time reshapes the old definition of the rock’n’roll sound, purposely peeling off all its layers of innocence, shine and stardom. What’s left is a very special roadtrip, a journey that could’ve been lifted from some peculiar theater piece or a Lynch film, a story of ordinary people, a collage of impressions speaking of an otherworldly existence that, in all its concreteness and out-of-text obsession, can feel more alien than voyeuristically peering through telescopes at the other end of which you could watch the daily life of weird little green men a few thousand light years away. Still, you can’t accuse the guys of lacking humor. Eight tracks radiate, in schizophrenic fashion, eight different approaches, ways of writing, styles, eight different characters, personalities.
The opener Burn It Down, with the dark simplicity of its lines »Nothing can compare to the ones that you loved«, comes closest to acid pop, the classics of patio parties for the masses, except that this time, besides the plain guitars of Ben Thrower and Brent Hinds, it’s mainly Tom Cheshire’s sweetly mumbling vocals up front, propped up by Hinds’ recognizably psychotic, slightly out-of-tune backing. »I got some coke and it’s in my pocket/ I got some pills and they’re not from a doctor,« Hinds confides, then decides in his head to burn down the old house, his former home. The acoustics in the second half of the song grow into a simple solo, far from the explosive melodic outbursts of Mastodon, while the two repeating chords lodge in your head like a foot-long nail, which, backed by Raines’ saxophones and disguised organ, West End Motel stubbornly hammer in between your two brain hemispheres.
One of the more tuneful little numbers on the album, the dive-bar ode El Myr, sails on into more reggae ´waters, an ethereal rock guitar sticks nicely to the syncopated organ, and the two vocalists weave an extremely listenable meditation on drunkenness and stonedness, while the harmonic buildup of all seven members of the band carries on with its contradictory hymn to narcotics, drives through the middle of nowhere, loneliness and old flames, and it seems perfectly natural that with a song like Witch Is Dead you wake up to a sunny morning in Salem, with the great boss of Americana, Bruce Springsteen, singing you your morning reveille on the radio. A tuneful sentimental number that, with a saxophone straight out of Grease itself, drives the bizarre soundtrack steadily onward toward total positivity and darkness at once. Wired on the mental juices of seven-piece symbiosis, West End Motel rustically return to the days of Salem, where, leaning against a church wall, they decide to relieve their bladders, and as a reward for their audacity get met with some swinging on the gallows. As if Nick Cave himself had written the track, only this time the depression is pierced by the blazing sun of seemingly naive music. If I Only Had Tomorrow (Second Chances), with its meditative vibe, is a little more reminiscent of the melodic interludes on the outstanding record Crack The Skye, only this time, instead of compact metallurgy, the engine of the work is closer to the post-rock of Red Sparowes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZiPVPsXIZw
There’s a lot of repetition and gradual stepping into new spheres. Surprises are few, and the record is jammed with an unexpected yet repetitive stringing together of similar scenes. That Brent grew up on the guitar sounds of Chet Atkins, Brian Setzer, Jimmy Bryant, Speedy West and other country masters of string picking is something I only learned afterward. It’s hard for me to picture a man from a sludgy prog lineup also tripping on the rockabilly of Stray Cats and whistling country tunes, while a slightly harder-sounding consolation gets poured into your ears by the song Bite. A sludgy, stoner brilliance of a composition, where piercing guitars penetrate a psychotic universe and, with their soloing, make up the main framework of the track. The more smoked-out Forgiveness then takes us into more carnival waters, and with its Italian-sounding seventies pop West End Motel conjure up the urge to revisit some Tarantino film, and after a cha-cha-cha rhythm the title track Only Time Can Tell, with a more psychedelic undertone, brings you almost to the end, and after the closing track Valentine there’s no completion or redemption, nor any discharge of the initial tension that stays with you all through listening to this oddball among last year’s musical offerings.
Pockets of airlessness and anxiety linger in the lungs. The darkness and the oily atmosphere of stonedness, aimlessness and repetition decenter and derail what was a lucidly set-up train of pleasure. It’s hard to say in one go whether the record Only Time Can Tell reaches the level of perfection we’ve gotten used to from Hinds. I also find it hard to say whether I even like the record, and hard to pin down what bugs me about the whole thing. Maybe that it’s not a classic Mastodon product? I didn’t expect that from a band of Hinds’ completely different co-conspirators anyway. There’s a lot of repetition, and the guys only slowly shift their psychedelic engine of pleasure into a higher gear. The album is a provocation, meant solely for exorcising Hinds’ personal demons, surplus inspiration. I probably wouldn’t have touched it at all if it didn’t carry the name of this brilliant young man, who is both the genius composer of Mastodon’s prehistoric ornamentation and so complexly, frustratedly hungry for subversion that he deliberately offers the world grains of gold hidden in tons of ballast. Only Time Can Tell is, just like the schizophrenic structure of its eight completely different building blocks, an album that confuses and clouds clear perception. There’s something good to be found underneath it all, but the whole, despite its apparent simplicity and repetition, is so demanding that it takes multiple cycles of listening, consuming, dosing. More time, in other words, and only after aeons will it be possible to judge whether this is a record carrying plenty of quality or just a relaxing moment of a star who, amid all the serious studio work with his main band, had a moment or two to himself and had to squeeze something out into the world’s ears – purely for his own soul and personal satisfaction.
Lineup
Brent Hinds – vocals, guitar
Phil Raines – tenor saxophone
Ben Thrower – acoustic guitar
Mark Carbone – drums
Mike Shina – guitar, keyboards
Stiff Penalty – bass guitar
Tom Cheshire – vocals
Will Raines – organ
Production
Brent Hinds
Tracklist
1. Burn It Down
2. El Myr
3. Witch Is Dead
4. If I Only Had Tomorrow (Second Chances)
5. Bite
6. Forgiveness
7. Only Time Can Tell
8. Valentine
