Capsule Review: Ben Nichols' The Last Pale Light In The West

Filling the dead-space between indiedom and the first major label outing for his band Lucero, Ben Nichols’s solo debut is as quiet and mannered a record as he’ll ever sing on. The sound - a bed of rambling guitar, pedal steel, piano and accordion - harkens back to, if anything, Lucero’s earliest recordings; like Lucero’s The Attic Tapes, the music on The Last Pale Light In The West is all simple genre exercise, proficient and appropriate. However, in the decade or so between those albums, Nichols has gone from raw talent to a blistering, diesel train of a singer and a songwriter of rare versatility. He brazenly evinces both of these traits on Pale Light, his very literal seven-song companion to Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.

Like its inspiration, the length of the album is deceptive - the songs are dense character analyses, heavily footnoted from the book, occasionally to the point of incomprehensibility for those who haven’t read it. Yet while Nichols never breaks character to traipse back to the highways and industrial parks of his usual fare, he pulls themes from Blood Meridian that are not unfamiliar to his fans - retribution, consequence, regret. Take for example the chorus of “The Kid” (“Drink up cause tonight your soul’s required of you”), which will certainly find a place before or after one of the toasts at Lucero’s live shows; Nichols uses McCarthy’s lyricism to tell his own tale. Which is fitting, since McCarthy appropriated that line from the New Testament.

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