Waldemar
Caley Conway, Free Dirt
Doors 7:00PM / Show 8:00PM
$12 ADV / $15 DOS
Singer-songwriter Gabe Larson is the artistic gravity behind Waldemar, a heartland indie rock band (think The War on Drugs and The National with a dash of Willie Nelson), based in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Waldemar combines soaring vocals and poignant, confessional lyrics against a dense backdrop of sweeping guitar tapestries and synth textures to deliver a sonic freight train of an album. The new record Ruthless is a journeyman musician’s fixation, the renegade harmonies of a blue-collar poet.
Written and recorded over a span of five years, Ruthless is an act of remarkable patience and commitment. For two of those years, Larson spent every moment outside of his job sanding floors, painstakingly transforming a weathered, century-old horse barn on his property into a professional recording studio with his brother and bandmate Nick Larson. The studio is hidden in plain sight, nestled along an alley in Eau Claire’s North Side Hill, blocks away from the old Uniroyal tire factory. The setting is incredibly generative and inspiring. Across the street is an elementary school, complete with the sounds of laughing children at play, and in the industrial buildings nearby, hundreds of laborers maintain the neighborhood’s workaday heritage.
Ruthless is the relentless vision of a musician perfecting a sound, the cascades of guitars, synths and vocals washing over a listener like rivers polishing stone, like grit on grains of wood. But the album also represents a different generative experience: the recent birth of Larson’s daughter, Ruth. In this, the album is a poetic dovetailing of a craftsman musician honing his trade, and his young family begetting new life. In a Midwestern setting that gave rise to so many other American dreams, Ruthless is a testament to the power of struggle, that we are made by what we make.
Caley Conway is a paradox, and “only a dark cocoon” finds her music at its most seductively paradoxical. Conway has always been at home in contrast— her music is orchestral yet minimal, full-sounding yet pared back. Her sound has been described as folk, but at the same time it has far too much bite. Conway’s vocals are comfortable yet haunting, and dissonant chords bubble underneath the band’s innocent patina.
At home in this world of contradictions, “Only a Dark Cocoon” evokes comparison yet stands out. This ekphrastic piece draws inspiration from Joni Mitchell’s song “The Last Time I Saw Richard,” expanding lyrical snippets into full-concept songs. Conway approaches Mitchell’s work like a collage, a close reading, or a writing prompt.
The EP sees Conway’s signature smoky vocal acrobatics undercut by warm, gain-y electric guitar bordering on feedback, and supported with the vintage sound of organ. Conway musically conjures the times, places, and people that Mitchell narrated in “The Last Time I Saw Richard”. Far from a cover, “Only a Dark Cocoon” is something inspired yet wholly singular – a concoction that Mitchell (walking into a bar where it plays on the jukebox), might turn her ear to as a half-remembered dream.
Free Dirt writes sturdy, dependable, sometimes funny songs that ring familiar while also feeling a bit tough to pin down. Their latest release Spaghetti and Mothballs, produced by the inimitable Boy Howdy, is a punchy tour through what these three best buds can do. On stage they take those finely crafted tunes, pull them apart and use the bricks to fashion a wobbling Tower of Babel. Come and see how close they get to heaven before it all tumbles back down to earth!