Barn Burning: Werner Ghost Truck (CD on Tarnished Records)

Band: Barn Burning
Label: Tarnished Records
Title: Werner Ghost Truck

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Band:Barn Burning
Title:Werner Ghost Truck
Reviewed By:John Clarkson
Date Published:21/04/2007

Label:Tarnished Records
Format:CD
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Barn Burning released one of the best, but most under-rated Americana records of 2003 with their debut album, 'Weatheredbound'.

In the four years since then things seem to have picked up very little for the Rhode Island-based band. A quick glance at the sleeve notes of their second CD, 'Werner Ghost Truck', shows only singer and guitarist Anthony Loffredio remaining as a full-time member from the six piece line-up of the group that recorded 'Weatheredbound'.

'Put the Drunk Drivers on the Guest List', upon which lap steel and guitar player Corwin Butterworth, who contributed heavily to that first recording, returns just briefly to make a brief cameo appearance, in fact chronicles the plight of a band rapidly shedding its members, and finding that its sell-by date has not so much past, but has never come.

"When the fun runs out it is time to pack it in and fade away" sings Lofreddio with bittersweet irony, yet still not prepared to give up on his band. "But I know an empty bar in Nashville where we could play/I know an empty bar in Black Mountain where we could play/I know an empty bar in Buffalo we could play."

'Werner Ghost Truck' was recorded in a large, uninhabited house, for which Jim Reynolds who engineered the album is the caretaker, over the course of a long, hard Massachusetts winter, and the "cold", "ice" and "winter" embody much of its lyrics. As befits the circumstances of its recording and an album, whose song titles also include 'Long Dark Room', 'Friendship Fails You', 'Flailing' and 'The Final Days of Our Better Days', it is an exceptionally dark work.

Loffredio's vocals have a gnarled gustiness, are the sound of a man beaten down by life one too many times amplified. The music, a swirling mesh of acoustic and electric guitars, keyboards and drums, is meanwhile always beautiful, but also throughout melancholic and forlorn.

The slow rattling, rustical opening number, ‘William’, is presumably about William and Elaine “Penny” Prince whose memory the album is dedicated to, and is seemingly about a death told from the heartbreaking perspective of the one left behind (“They have emptied the big white house and piled your things in the driveway/An old mandolin/A broken down train set sits out”).

In the first-rate middle section of the album, Butterworth’s pealing lap steel suddenly slips the music up tempo on ‘Put the Drunk Drivers on the Guest List’.

The next track ‘Friendship Fails You’, about the collapse of a long-term friendship after a betrayal and it alcohol-enflamed aftermath, is similarly striking, culminating in a duet between Lofreddio and special guest the Willard Grant Conspiracy’s Robert Fisher. Fisher has been a long term champion of the band, co-producing ‘Weathererdbound’, and his soft baritone and Loffredio’s more guttural vocals circle and weave around each other, against the backdrop of Brad Malone’s searing violin, to stunning, magnificent effect.

After this, there is the gritty, thunderous rock of ‘Flailing’, about the devastating demise of a love affair (“Love won’t wait when you’re starring at the brick walls of life/When you scream over and over it’s over/I’m leaving again”), in which the other two members of the current four-piece band, James Merida with his cascading, shimmering bass, and James Toomey with clapping drums, are both thrust briefly, but convincingly to the fore.

As the album comes towards an end, its bleakness-the moroseness and lonely angst of Lofreddio’s vocals, and its dirge-like mass of sound-unfortunately, however, proves all too much and it becomes grindingly monotonous. It needs to have and to balance this out on these last tracks, ‘The Final Days of Our Better Days’, ‘The Send Off ‘ and ‘Winter Palace’, more in the way of the little flourishes of contrast of the type -Fisher’s vocals, Butterworth’s pedal steel work and the sudden dominance of the rhythm section-that makes its central part such enticing listening.

With this compelling but flawed record, Barn Burning have made a good rather than the outstanding album it promises at one point to be. Now that their line-up seems more stable, and with the odd good review beginning to trickle in from Europe, there are hopefully better times ahead and they will stay together to record another record without some of the problems that have dogged the band between the recording of this album and the last album.

‘Werner Ghost Truck’ may not be quite a masterpiece, but one suspects that may yet come with this under acknowledged group’s third album.

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Compelling, but flawed second album from under acknowledged Rhode Island-based Americana group Barn Burning

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Werner Ghost Truck - CD
Compelling, but flawed second album from under acknowledged Rhode Island-based Americana group Barn Burning

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