Wooden Wand & The Briarwood Virgins / Briarwood

Wooden Wand & The Briarwood Virgins
Briarwood
(Fire Records)
* * * *

Fans of Ryan Adams and Damian Jurado will find much to admire with this combination of aching Americana and whiskey soaked storytelling, straight out of the ‘lessons of life’ handbook.
Things start off humbly enough; ‘Winter in Kentucky’ features the symbolic sweeping of snow in a church courtyard while ‘Wither Away’ is melancholic yet battle-hardened, with a fantastically distressed solo.

The route is changed mid-album with ‘Big Mouth USA’ – a hillbilly barroom singalong, it has a dig at outspoken bigotry in the land of the free. The record then hustles through the whoozey, bluesy ‘Good Time Man’ before signing off with a resigned suicide note, ‘DNR Waltz’ (which takes us back into the territory of never living down your mistakes, never attaining your hopes, and gulp!- finally being tipped over the edge).

For all the album’s melancholy, you can’t help but spot a touch of comedy in the darkness (with lyrics that concern feeling like “a moth in a vacuum cleaner”, for example), and it becomes all the richer for it.