CAUGHT IN A WEB It's easy to get snagged by Hartley's lyrical baits-and-switches. |
Not everyone listens to country, but most of us listen to people, and Wesley Allen Hartley is a damned interesting one. An active musician in Portland for around 10 years, the importance of Hartley’s music can get overshadowed by his idiosyncracies (musical and otherwise) and his own prolific nature. In fact, he’s already released three records since Convenient Repairs, the 11-song album he self-produced with little fanfare last May, and started a new band with members of the Portland punk group Mouth Washington. Yet in a way, the man’s recent string of slapdash, experimental ventures have helped re-frame Repairs as a kind of landmark — the “serious album” artists spit out at pivotal moments in their careers and, if they’re good, immediately file away to focus on the next intensity.
But though it’s nearly a year later, we’re not absolved from giving him our attention. Since his days fronting the surly indie-rock band Dead End Armory, Hartley has forged his tools as a musician into a kind of Swiss Army knife — his guitar pops open the can; voice strips the wire; words apply the blade. On Convenient Repairs, an album of country ballads so spare and dour as to be almost musically formless, it’s Hartley’s humanity that cuts listeners to the quick, offering clarity and capacity more soundly channeled than I’ve ever heard in his music.
The record leads with the single “Dress Up Me,” a fine little ditty (though not the album’s best) employing a now masterful Hartleyan formula: a verse or two of tangled, impressionistic tableaux that gets sliced open by searing subjective insights. We get some mumbo-jumbo about “swinging from a jawline again” and an odd nod to a slick haircut, then in swoops the chorus like a wounded hawk, tearing through the inert scenery with the claws of raw personal confession. “I’m just tryin’ to get a grip here,” he wails, letting fly the song’s — fuck, maybe the album’s — through line. That method comes again in the 90-second “Right My Future,” as Hartley takes the piss awhile, singing about tornados and pickles and alligators, before he gets down to business wrestling the question of “who’s to blame here.” And in “Dead Beat,” I’m nearly lulled into complacency by Hartley the trickster, spouting off in a whimsical falsetto some prolix verse about rich folks before completely swapping out the target in his crosshairs, providing the album’s most scary-raw moment (as well as a fat lump in this writer’s chest).
Whether he’s a country singer masquerading as a rock guy or vice versa, Hartley has been capable of writing heartwrenching, idiomatic lines for years now. So yeah, this album’s full of them. Yet as a poet, he’s become disarmingly good at penning sudden, 180-degree turns into the narratives of his songs, lyrical bait-and-switches allowing for Hartley to twist the plot — and the knife — just a bit deeper. It’d be something criminal to give these away in a mere review, but just to offer an example: I listened to “Gold as a Heart” for the first time while having a conversation with a friend, where its wistful refrain of “you’ve got something special” sounded, you know, maybe a little saccharine. Later, alone, I realized I hadn’t caught that Hartley had also voiced a rejoinder, the dark rider which can accompany that feeling yet rarely gets put into language: “But I want something else.” What’s a person to do with a thought that heavy? Swallow it?
