Withered Hand – ‘Serenity Prayer’ from ‘How To Love’
If Meursault and Neil Pennycook are/is adept at taking songs of gloomy introspection and sinking them in music that embraces and empathises their mood, then Withered Hand and Dan Wilson are/is expert in taking those moods and making songs that both sympathise and weirdly, wildly exaggerate them within a sound that can be astonishingly euphoric.
We’re talking degrees here of course. I mean, one suspects that children weaned on whatever the current frothy Pop Confection might happen to be the flavour du jour (my situation precludes me from familiarity with such) would find Withered Hand to be wholly lacking in joy and decidedly ‘old fashioned’. I do not make that statement pejoratively, incidentally, but nor is it an insult (though again, some might take it as such) to suggest that those of my own age who have a love of 1960s Bubblegum, 70s Powerpop and 80s/90s independent Pop and ‘rock’ might absolutely agree that there is unprecedented delight to be found in Wilson’s records.
It is nearly a decade since Withered Hand’s mighty ‘New Gods’ LP set topped the Unpopular advent and, a ten-year revision/celebration of 2009’s ‘Good News’ aside, it has been a long time to wait for a new record. ‘How To Love’ does not disappoint, and that infamous Delta 5 line about anticipation being so much better is in this instance proved wrong. Back in 2014 I wrote that “It seemed to me that in ’New Gods’ we glimpsed the ghosts of Gene Clark and Gram Parsons sharing a bourbon in an LA Airport lounge whilst daydreaming of peat fires and Sauchiehall Street” and in some respects that still holds true. The sound of Withered Hand does feel as though it may be both rooted in and pulled apart by a duality which takes in traditions of Scottish Folk and American Rock. These two aspects combine in a manner that at times recalls James Grant’s Love And Money, that band of former Friends Again folks who mined the Blue Eyed Soul sensation of late ‘80s Glasgow before maturing into the landscapes of Americana, turning more Jayhawks than Box Tops, perhaps.
Yet Withered Hand are better again. Somehow Dan Wilson retains an ability to conjure echoes of a soulful connection through the careful, understated placement of horns and harmonising backing vocals. When this is utilised, as on the glorious ‘Waking Up’, ‘Give Myself Away’ and ‘Misery and Company’’, it is a wonderful gasp of pleasure. Musically, these songs are dramatically exuberant, gleefully celebratory. Lyrically, however, it’s a different story. Words are downbeat, riddled with self-doubt. You sense that Dan Wilson finds all of this difficult. Making records. Being on stage. Doing the public artist thing. Life, generally, perhaps. It’s a duality that many might empathise with, and it is one that certainly seems to fire these songs onto a different plane.
If the contrast between lyrical and musical mood is marvellously exaggerated on those upbeat numbers, then the marriage of tone on the album’s two epic slow-dances is devastating. Both the album’s title track and ‘Serenity Prayer’ pass the six minute mark, the former edging closer to seven. Both too are solemn hymns to the problematic nature of existence, subtle grapplings with what we feel ourselves surrounded by, for better and for worse. Given the inevitable cultural baggage, I hesitate to reference Elliot Smith in relation to Withered Hand, but there is certainly something of Smith’s broken, blasted American Gothic Folk tradition in ‘Serenity Prayer’. Something of his whispered solitude. The song is one that acknowledges futility but one that also glimpses a light which might lead us on.
‘Thy will be done’ sings Wilson, the refrain oscillating between optimism and surrender, between belief and rejection. Moments of duality within a record to which that essence is the lifeblood.