E-Mail This Article to a Friend Regarding the beginning? Robert Fisher and Willard Grant Conspiracy take a big step forward BY JONATHAN PERRY

Moving things forward," as Willard Grant Conspiracy frontman Robert Fisher puts it, is a theme that preoccupies his thoughts and actions these days. In fact, movement and all that the word implies — departure, arrival, change, momentum — have been squarely at the center of Fisher’s life for better than a year now. After eight years, eight European tours, and four albums (three of them on the Rykodisc imprint Slow River), his shape-shifting collective WGC ended their relationship with their old label and signed with a new imprint, the Ipswich-based upstart Kimchee Records; now they’ve released their fifth full-length disc, Regard the End.

True to WGC tradition, the album had already been released in Europe before it dropped in the US market in mid February. And like the band’s past four albums, it garnered rave reviews; it was even named one of the top five releases of 2003 by the British music magazine Uncut. The disc features fetching guest appearances by Throwing Muses frontwoman Kristin Hersh (on the real-life portrait "The Ghost of the Girl in the Well"), local folk-pop artist Jess Klein ("The Suffering Song"), and Fisher’s new labelmate Blake Hazard (who sprinkles sunshine all over the John Dragonetti drum-looped track "Soft Hand," which is easily the poppiest tune Fisher’s ever put to tape). Upon its release in Europe last summer, "Soft Hand" was tapped for the soundtrack to the Farrelly Brothers’ latest farce, Stuck on You. Fisher’s outfit has often been described as "cinematic," but Matt Damon/Greg Kinnear comedic vehicles are not what usually leap to mind when one ponders WGC’s catalogue of brooding torment.

Then again, Fisher has always flinched at those doomy Nick Cave comparisons. "I’ll wait to see if the record sells, but I kind of feel vindicated," he says over lunch at Matt Murphy’s Pub in Brookline. "You have to find the right people to move things forward, and having ‘Soft Hand’ show up in a Farrelly Brothers movie says there’s a legitimate, broader audience for our music than anyone to date has believed there was — other than me and a few other people. For the most part, people haven’t thought of us as a band that can translate to a broad appeal, and I just think that’s wrong. I’ve always thought that’s wrong."

Kimchee Records co-founder Bob Dubrow is a long-time fan of both WGC and Fisher’s previous outfit, Laughing Academy, and as a DJ he played both bands’ music regularly on his WMBR-FM local live radio show, Pipeline! He hopes his label can help prove Fisher’s point. "I think this is the strongest record we’ve been involved with. Robert played my last Pipeline!, in February 2003, and played four or five songs, and I had shivers going down my spine. I knew something was up with these songs. I don’t think the sound strays far from the sound you find on other Kimchee records, which is a certain darkness and seriousness of purpose."

Yet what set Fisher’s recent professional triumphs in forward motion was his willingness to take a few steps back first. After WGC collaborator and guitarist Paul Austin split from the band following the release of 2000’s Everything’s Fine, Fisher had to teach himself how to play guitar well enough to perform the songs in a live setting. "This is the first record I made without Paul. So it was really important that I prove to myself that I could pick up a guitar and be disciplined enough to learn it well enough to not disappoint my band members and not disappoint an audience." Then in 2003, after living in Boston for nearly 25 years, Fisher moved back to his boyhood stomping grounds of Southern California’s Antelope Valley, buying a house at the edge of the Mojave desert, where, he recalls, "as a kid we used to wander out in the desert and hunt rattlesnakes and lizards."

It’s been a bittersweet return for the songwriter, who says he misses Boston and his close-knit group of friends and musicians even as he continues to be fascinated by how closely his childhood home town hews to his teenage memories. "The desert’s still an idiosyncratic, strange place full of unusual, eccentric people, and it’s like a time warp. Where I live, hot rods are still the thing, and the car culture that everybody’s familiar with through American Graffiti still exists — it’s all American Graffiti and meth labs and suburban homes. I still expect to turn on the radio and hear Wolfman Jack every day, but of course I don’t."