Willard Grant Conspiracy – Regard The End

The Willard Grand Conspiracy is less a band than a collective, along the lines of the Mekons or Howe Gelb’s Giant Sand. More than 30 musicians can lay claim to being members; recordings and performances include whoever’s available.

Eleven members assembled in Ljubljana, Slovenia, to record this set on instruments including grand piano, melodica, violin, viola, trumpet, field organ and saw. The band’s music, entirely midtempo, revolves around Robert Fisher’s eclectic taste, inspired arrangements and memorable voice, an earth-warm, rugged and deep medium recalling Tom Waits, Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner or Richard Thompson.

Otherwise of a piece with earlier releases, Regard The End is a concept record revolving around death and faith. In his Latin-tempo treatment of the traditional “River In The Pines”, a variation on the Romeo & Juliet theme, Fisher opens with faith in eternal love. The gentle lullaby “Day Is Passed And Gone”, which he found in a Jean Richey songbook, is updated with Fisher’s own music. Its message calms the fear of night and its attending shades.

In the closer, Fisher’s original “The Suffering Song”, the desperately bereft characters look for ways to reinvent themselves without the hub of the family wheel. “Beyond The Shore” is Fisher’s lovely first entry into the simplicity and redeeming hope of gospel music.

The set’s darkest moment comes with “Ghost Of The Girl In The Well”, a stark, first-person account of a slave girl co-written with the late Manny Verzosa. Fisher’s radical reworking of a traditional square dance tune, “Twistification”, lifts the overall mood. “Rosalee”, co-written with Paige La Grone, wraps love, metaphoric death and the will to carry on into an anecdote of real-life romance. In Regard The End, Willard Grant Conspiracy resolves them all into something like grace.