In the small Oregon logging town of Clatskanie a girl goes missing. The story is on the news for a while. The cops suspect the girl’s husband, a former logger whose leg was crushed in a logging accident, is responsible, but they can’t pin anything on him. Not that they can find him anyway. Neither one of them is heard from again.
Richmond Fontaine’s High Country, a film noir in the form of a concept album (composed by the band’s leader, Willy Vlautin) tells the real story of the girl’s disappearance, and in its unfolding we learn that it’s actually two stories. The Girl (we never learn her name) is trapped in a loveless marriage with the disabled former logger. She works in town at an auto parts store and all the men come in and try to hit on her. After work, she wanders the logging roads in the trees and the rain and dreams of better things. The girl’s songs are sung by Deborah Kelly from the Texas band The Damnations. Her tunes are, depending upon the narrative circumstances, sad (“Let Me Dream of the High Country”) or wistful (“I Can See a Room”), and for the most part succeed in getting the listener emotionally involved in her dilemma. Especially when she meets and falls in love “The Mechanic,” a young man who moves into town to take care of his ailing father (“The Mechanic’s Life”). His character, as with all the other male characters, is voiced by Vlautin, whose melodic rasp is perfectly suited for his downtrodden Western antiheroes.
Unbeknownst to the two young lovers stealing kisses in the shadows in town, someone else has fallen in love with the girl while spying her wandering around on the logging roads. His name is Claude Murray. As detailed in one of the stand out songs on the record,”The Chainsaw Sea,” he subsists on Rainer beer and speed and stays, along with his wife Melanie, in the back room of a bar called The Chainsaw Sea. You do not want to get Claude mad at you. Buried beneath the concrete of the bar are a fat man from Mississippi and a hooker from town. Their sin? Laughing at him.
Another speed freak named Angus King owns the land that houses The Chainsaw Sea. Vlautin (the author three novels, by the way) succinctly sketches out the details: King hasn’t left his house since 2003, he opened the bar in the seventies, he left the army addicted to speed and they pulled all his teeth in ’93. As we learn in the course of the album, Angus might be speed-addled and paranoid but he’s only a danger to himself.
The excellence of “The Chainsaw Sea” overwhelms many of the other songs (several of them wordless crooning that I picture as montages in the film version of this story) on the record, which is a pretty typical problem one encounters with even the greatest concept albums. The songs may serve the story, but they may not stand alone as fully realized songs.
A successful example of an unconventional song serving the story is “Angus King Tries to Leave the House,” in which Vlautin repeatedly wails “I’m gonna leave, I’m gonna leave, I’m gonna leave the house” with increasing desperation over a Metalish musical background. It’s not easy to listen to, but it works. We get a sense of the man’s tormented inner state, trapped in his head as much as he is in his house. Ultimately, Angus admits defeat, and says, “Maybe tomorrow,” as the song concludes.
Less successful is “Claude Murray’s Breakdown,” which features spoken dialogue between Claude and Angus. Claude has spotted The Girl and The Mechanic together. He’s freaking out and needs to talk to someone; Angus just wants him to go away. What should be a powerful, intense exchange (especially when Claude tells Angus that he’d burn his wife with a blowtorch to get shut of her) comes off less so because the lines are performed somewhat amateurishly. Vlautin is a powerful actor when he sings, but not when he tries to “act.”
Meanwhile, the tension of the story builds. While Claude is freaking out, the two oblivious young lovers meet behind The Eagles Lodge, a bar in town planning their escape (“The Eagles Lodge”). The Mechanic is eager to leave, knowing that time is running out, although he has no idea where the real threat resides.
Back in hell, the breaking point comes in the hard-driving song, “Lost in the Trees.” Angus has been apparently coaxed out of the house for a speed party out in the woods with some girls, some dudes, and the narrator of the song, who I think is Claude, but maybe isn’t (it’s not entirely clear to me). Everything goes wrong, everyone freaks out amongst the trees. They are clearly lost in more ways than one. The narrator hollers out the bewildering details: girls wander off naked; it gets dark; they try to start a fire but can’t; one of the girls starts yelling how they’re all going to die; the narrator bellows, “I screamed her name until my voice broke.” And then he softly, as if exhausted by all the drama, adds, “Angus really fell apart then.”
From there, the narrative hurtles to its inevitable (but not necessarily predictable) tragic conclusion. I won’t reveal any spoilers other than to say “On a Spree” and “The Escape” are two excellent murder ballads that round out the album. They are shocking, violent, and even a little funny.
On the whole, High Country, is a flawed but compelling concept album that has been in heavy rotation on my iPod for the past week or so. It’s not the first Richmond Fontaine record I’d recommend to the uninitiated (try Post to Wire or Thirteen Cities), but it’s an impressive show of ambition from the tireless creative mind of Willy Vlautin.
