Album Review: William Tyler - Impossible Truth
- Written by Alistair Seaton
William Tyler’s first LP under his own name, Behold The Spirit, received strong reviews but his dominant role to date has been that of gifted sideman. He has played with a long list of bands, including Lambchop, Wooden Wand and, most recently, Hiss Golden Messenger, always making his presence felt, but in a sympathetic way, never grandstanding.
Tyler is both articulate and transparent on the subject of what influenced this, his second solo studio record. On his website he features, among others, Randy Newman, Fairport Convention and Alex Chilton in a playlist of influences along with the reading material that informs the themes he explores here. He can be definitive about this because the album has no lyrics, which might otherwise offer their own interpretations. It is in essence a solo guitar project that, in his words, is “a somber tribute to the bygone era of 70s singer songwriters” and the “themes of apocalyptic expectation and the weight of nostalgia.” This no exercise in acoustic finger-picking nostalgia though. Instead it also shimmers with effects and 12-string electric guitars.
Impossible Truth rolls along like an enchanting roadtrip, each track capturing a changing landscape, often with a relentless hypnotic rhythm played out by Tyler's thumb on his guitar strings, sometimes alone, sometimes subtly accompanied by pedal steel or upright bass. For an album that feels very informed by geography, it isn’t constrained by a specific location or actual places on a map. Eastern stylings dominate the opener, ‘Country of Illusion’. Here, changes of pace provide shades of light and dark and a sense of movement, as if a train pulling into and leaving a station. The tremolo guitar on ‘Geography of Nowhere’ conjures up the desert and could be the soundtrack to an unmade western. Guitar motifs are established, disappear and reappear as the song unfolds. ‘Cadillac Desert’ introduces Byrds-style 12-string riffs, while the acoustic ‘We Can't Go Home Again’ and ‘A Portrait of Sarah’ recall Bert Jansch and Fairport Convention. This all builds up to the stunning 10-minute closing track, ‘The World Is Set Free’.
Each song has its place and adds to the whole, with enough variation to provide interest throughout, so it would be wrong to pick a highlight. This is very much an album and not just a selection of tracks. Impossible Truth is amazingly lyrical as well as atmospheric and would make an ideal traveling companion. But perhaps Tyler’s friend and upcoming touring companion, M C Taylor (of Hiss Golden Messenger), puts it best when he says, “William will worry a phrase—some tangled chordal wormhole—until you are certain it’s all that exists, he’ll take you over the stiles, he’ll love you up and down and then he’ll make you cry for the world and what we’ve done to it.
Impossible Truth is out now and available from amazon