Willie Nile – Beautiful Wreck Of The World

With his raspy yelp of a voice, a poetic gift both urbane and romantic, and a wildly kinetic and acrobatic stage show, Willie Nile burst onto the late ’70s New York City scene as the bastard spawn of Bob Dylan and Patti Smith. Despite two fine albums for Arista and a high-profile tour opening for The Who, his path in the ’80s and ’90s has not been easy.

In fact, 1991’s Places That Are Gone, recorded with help from such high-profile admirers as Roger McGuinn and Richard Thompson, represents Nile’s only released studio album since those early days. So what a surprise it is to encounter Beautiful Wreck Of The World, which delivers on the immense promise of Nile’s explosive Arista debut of 20 years ago.

All the ingredients of Nile’s trademark sound are in place: ringing guitars, courtesy of sometime Mellencamp sidekick Andy York; rousing pop hooks that reverberate in simple, direct Buddy Holly-esque fashion; a sly nod-and-a-wink existentialism; and heartfelt populist underpinnings. Blasting out of the gate with “You Gotta Be A Buddha (In A Place Like This)”, a stream-of-consciousness satire in the amphetamine-rush tradition of Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and R.E.M.’s “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It”, Beautiful Wreck is by turns funny, earnest, catchy, transcendent.

While “Black Magic And White Lies” and “Every Time The World Turns Around” revel in their sparkling pop grandeur, it’s the more pensive tracks that cut deepest. Particularly affecting is “The Black Parade”, whose meditation on death sadly echoes the themes of displacement and homelessness in one of Nile’s finest early songs, “Old Men Sleeping On The Bowery”. Buried near the end is the record’s (and perhaps Nile’s) masterpiece, “On The Road To Calvary (for Jeff Buckley)” — a sweeping, majestic ballad, an epiphany really, with a spiritual dimension almost never heard in pop music.