Thin White Rope
The Ruby Sea

- Do you want to tell me where you're headed, Travis?- (Travis looks ahead and points to the infinite without speaking to his brother)

- What's over there? There's nothing there!-

Like Travis's brother in "Paris Texas" by Wim Wenders, many visitors to this site would see only the desert. Travis, however, sees HIS infinite there and does not understand why he shouldn't go exploring it, since it is the only way to regain oneself.

Similarly, Thin White Rope, like Travis, are heading towards that virtual frontier between being and knowledge. This is what makes them great, the ability to capture the spirit of a thousand ghosts, styles, influences, the lived experience, and return it as an integral whole, not layered to be analyzed like a book already read. And it was a band out of every trend, the Thin White Rope, who from the mid-eighties continued to express their music rather than being expressed by the music of the moment.

We know that their name is taken from "Naked Lunch" by William Burroughs but perhaps we don't know that for them it indicates, besides the path of a semen squirt, other solutions, like a sort of invisible bond between people that shares that kind of discomfort and tension through a thin whitish thread similar to the one that was cut when we were separated from the maternal body at birth. And thus, the hoarse voice of Guy Kyser tells stories of paranoia and emotion, rough and sweet at the same time, mixed with guitars steeped in a slow-paced acidic blend of punk rooted in country and psychedelia, measured with precise patience necessary to cross a barren expanse like the desert where solitude marks each step. A desert that can be made of sand or of thousands of city buildings; what matters is that the setting surrounding us and the painful but necessary journey of Travis in "Paris Texas" lead us to rediscover ourselves.

And after years of aridity, in 1991 emerges this "The Ruby Sea," where instead the taste of the land is ever stronger and where again the most beautiful songs have the pentatonic mammary forms of maternal breasts. The guitars of Kyser and Kunkel intertwine to rediscover those even stronger country roots that they had in the past, as if, after five albums, the desert journey had brought them full circle back to their origins but with greater awareness.

The guitars are more ruthless than ever, dry and crisp like the sentences of a Carver book, "Hunter's Moon" is Kyser's paean in search of himself and then his voice swings from velvety sweetness to shouted anger until the unstoppable crescendo with hands plunged into the dampness of mother earth. And it is incredibly natural that this violence flows into the dreamy country of "Christmas Skies" with the whisper of voice and slide echoes soothing the previously contracted wounds. And instead, the dark "The Fish Song" is powerful with its dry drumming branding with fire a black ballad, hypnotic and exhausting until it dazes like a dervish dance. But the water's bottom is strewn with stars and the loveliest is "Puppet Dogs", melancholic to the point of emotion for Kyser's voice that tells one of his ghost stories from the past cradled by the distortion of guitars. And perhaps "Bartender's Rag" doesn't capture that sweetly country soul of a ragged cowboy who has too often banished evil spirits from his body? The almost doom pace of "Midwest Flower" is well known to Thin White Rope followers with that clean guitar work, assisted by Kyser and Kunkel's dry and precise rhythm, and that is a trademark of the TWR label.

The title track "The Ruby Sea" is placed right at the beginning of the album, an acid ballad that as always lives on the extraordinary voice of Guy Kyser alternating between darkness and light. The acoustic guitar of "The Clown Song" closes another exploration of the earth's false surface and with it another good performance without frills from one of the most warmly hypnotic bands I have ever had the chance to listen to live.

The score? I address an adult audience, who every day faces the problem of earning the money needed for the mortgage and who are worried about the rising price of bread. For these people, grades are a distant memory from when they went to school under the protection of their family’s hard work and thought that everything could be evaluated with fours or sevens. And that therefore everything could be summed up, the good and the bad, the right and the wrong, based on a grade. Today I am sure these people do not need my score for the album, they have read the review and understood what needed to be understood.

And how will the kids accustomed to grades to appreciate an album manage? There are many great reviews written by their peers, they should read those and come back to this one in twenty years, if they still wish to.