Willard Grant Conspiracy – Flying Low

What began two years ago as friends giving a new home studio a trial by fire has blossomed into a genuine musical phenomenon. Flying Low, the sophomore album from Boston’s Willard Grant Conspiracy, is a marvel of depth and atmosphere that references nearly every archly weird musical endeavor from the modern era without sounding like any of them exactly.

“House Is Not A Home” has an unplugged Velvets feel, with vocalist Robert Fisher doing a passable imitation of John Cale, his Boston accent suggesting Cale’s Welsh intonation. Next comes the mini-opus “Bring The Monster Inside”, which plays like the Jefferson Airplane’s acid-washed folk meanderings as fronted by Tom Waits singing through a megaphone under a flaming umbrella. The eight-minute “No Such Thing As Clean” is all of the above plus a thick overlay of Neil Youngian guitar squall.

WGC stirs up any number of disparate currents on Flying Low, and strangely enough, none of them are at odds with each other. Robert Fisher’s voice is a welcome addition to the pantheon of bottom-register vocalists whose delivery resonates at a consciously visceral level (Iggy Pop and Nick Cave spring uneasily to mind). The band, a rotating cast of musicians that has included the Silos’ Walter Salas-Humara and Sugar’s Malcolm Travis, are masters of multi-instrumentalism, weaving eerie tapestries with banjo, mandolin, toy piano and violin, along with the standard stuff played in anything but the standard way.

WGC calls their sound “swamp noir,” and while it’s an apt description of the color, it doesn’t begin to describe the weary majesty of Flying Low. The music that emanates from the speakers is both comforting and bleak, soothing and agitating, harmonious and discordant. It is within the tension created by these forces tugging at the listener that the Willard Grant Conspiracy has erected its circus tents and screams for you to peek inside, in equal awe at the wonder and the horror of everyday life.