Wooden Wand - Death Seat
- Written by Tom Bolton
James Jackson Toth has an extensive back catalogue of downbeat country songs, including several albums released as Wooden Wand. He’s a man who’s been having a bad time for a while and isn’t afraid to sing about it. He lost a major label deal, split up with his wife, was abandoned mid-tour by his band and got arrested for drink-driving, one after the other. Since then he has released albums called Born Bad and Hard Knox. Now we have Death Seat, its cover featuring the word DEATH floating among dark, dark clouds. So it’s a relief when the first track, ‘Sleepwalking After Midnight’, turns out to be a mellow, late night country croon-along, with intimate backing vocals and lyrics. Suggesting that “by the light of the watercolour sun, no-one will recall what they’ve done”, Toth serves up an agreeably offbeat love song, in which “everybody is stumbling around”.
Agreeable is an appropriate verdict on the first half of this album which, although often intelligently written, lacks the elements of surprise needed to distinguish it from myriad other folky, country offerings. Lyrics such as “I have lived life in reverse sometimes, I have walked right in and said goodbye” provide little we haven’t learned to expect from a man with a guitar and a pessimistic outlook on life. But although much of the album trundles past without rattling the teacups, there are moments that make it worth a little attention. The production, by Swans noise-guru Michael Gira, is pin-sharp and lifts the best tracks out of the mire. ‘Servant to Blues’ is a case in point, an unsettling song with quietly distorted guitars and a queasy organ endorsing Toth’s sinister boast that “Only a servant to blues would wait this long for you.” It’s not clear exactly what he means, but it definitely isn’t healthy.
The chorus to ‘Bobby’, who “painted his house the colour of skin, so if the situation called for it he could blend in”, benefits from a well-balanced combination of catchy tune, growling guitars and Toth’s warm baritone. The best track on the album, ‘I Made You’, has a finger picking guitar at the front of the mix and Toth growling along behind, again giving the strong impression that he’s neither stable nor safe to be with. Strangely triumphant, he insists “I made you baby, I made you out of clay”, and the melancholy guitar builds a sense of foreboding that stays with the listener far after the music’s done.
Title track, ‘Death Seat’, features a trilling mandolin for variety, but by this point in the album the novelty is wearing off and the song is sounding too much like three of its five predecessors. Setting off at a reckless snail’s pace, it plods its way from start to finish. And from here on in, with little if any change in pace from song to song, the ratio of work to reward dips alarmingly and the reviewer’s patience wears thin.
The remaining songs become impossible to distinguish from one another. Soon time loses its meaning, imperceptibly replaced by ‘country time’, a deadly parallel existence in which innocent people are bound to their chairs and forced to listen to a bottomless jukebox of songs about bad marriages, bad health, bad drink, cancer and miscellaneous other bad things. Even Michael Gira can’t sort this one out. You need more than a wizard behind the desk to make you care, and by the time Toth is singing “A hotel TV in the sky, a hotel TV in the sky” in ‘Hotel Bar’ there’s no longer any reason to be interested.
The final track, ‘Tiny Confessions’, sounding oddly like Tindersticks, is a little more engaging in that it possess a sense of humour: “baby when you make the bed, don’t you short-sheet it on me”. However, it sticks with albums tried and tested ‘Little Donkey’ tempo, and as such is representative of a record that displays significant song-writing talent to very little purpose.