Album Review – Joshua Black Wilkins “While You Wait”
Gianfranco Callieri
Posted On December 16, 2010
There’s still a place in America where bourbon flows like a river, cigarettes burn fast and guitars sound masculine and rugged: in this particular case we’re talking about Joshua Black Wilkins’ Nashville. Firmly convinced that the differences between Hank Williams and Social Distortionare almost irrelevant, Joshua is a songwriter who walks the thin line between country and rock’n’roll.
It would be a real pity to ignore While You Wait, especially for the ones who love the ramshackle country-rock’n’roll of early Steve Earle and the blue collar poetry of Chris Knight. This is the fourth album in a 10-year career entirely (and proudly) devoted to austere independence. Wilkins delivers his own 12 song blue-collar epic about the roots of American music with his hoarse voice singing of rusted cars, industrial landscapes, roads and fields in the pouring rain, lost loves and regrets.
The stand-out elements are found in the author’s acute vision, his particular devotion to imagery, and the cinematic quality used to describe either human or visual landscapes.
It’s not a coincidence that Wilkins is also a really talented photographer: on his website he sells three books and taking a quick glance at the photos you can see that he spent a lot of time soaking up the poetic, bitter sociology ofRobert Frank. Frank produced some of the most gritty portraits of American culture: The Americans (1958) is a milestone, and the introduction to the book was written by Jack Kerouac.
The songs of While You Wait can be heard as a musical transposition of Frank’s photo portraits: the dark country-rock of Drunk Before (Amanda Pearl Shires on violin and background vocals), the electro-acoustic mourn of Halos, and the martial rock effort of the amazing Backseat Of Her Car are all framed by a big picture composed by marginalization and working class pride. A movie that it’s not hard to imagine would be set in dark corners and dead end streets, scruffy trailer-parks and unmanned suburbs.
Even when colors are not so dark, Wilkins’ “opacity” still stands out, like in the sparkling honky-tonk of Staying Up, Sleepin In. This “opacity” thankfully doesn’t dissolve into a dull gloominess, but it clearly draws a poem about working-class solitude. It happens in the pedal-steel serenade I Know Your Route, in the restless electric balladJaded (one of the highlights) and in the intimate unplugged simplicity of Picture on the Wall. Out of all the country-rockers that have sung for the Desolation Angels (to use Kerouac’s words) Joshua Black Wilkins seems to me one of the most true and sincere.
Maybe he’s not the next big thing (just to be clear), but you shouldn’t miss the opportunity to enjoy this coin that disappears in the jukebox of tattoos, Jack Daniel’s, rock’n’roll, Tennessee’s fields, melodies like wild horses, memories and nostalgia.
2010,While You Wait (Joshua Black Wilkins ) 7
Gianfranco Callieri
Originally appeared on:
