Widespread Panic
Ball

The eighth studio album by Widespread (2003) starts off well: the minor arpeggio of “Fishing” on the acoustic guitar is similar to a thousand others, but it immediately creates an atmosphere. The band insists on it throughout the piece, foregoing the chorus and thus giving it a mantra-like swing. In “This Ain’t Smells Like Mississippi” (always cool titles), the Santana effect returns, thanks to that rolling rhythm full of timbales (even in a brief solo) and Houser’s “smoked” guitar, which rolls over the Hammond carpet.

“Tortured Artist” vaguely reminds me of David Crosby’s “Almost Cut My Hair,” also beautifully acid, fearfully seventies, Californian. “Papa Johnny Road” brings the music back to the southeastern stadiums... poor Gregg Allman would have liked this southern thing, soft and round as we’ll never be able to do in Europe: dragged and delicious. Terrible is the contrast with the heavy, shadowy riff introducing “Sparks Fly,” half mumbled and half sung.

“Counting Train Cars” is a straightforward and compact country rock; the slide, the guitars, the piano, the harmonica take turns around the voice for a minor yet impeccable episode. Not so with “Don’t Wanna Lose You,” which enjoys a very banal riff but managed with superior class. Later, it’s the piano that takes the reins and then concludes this great piece of hypnotic and engaging American rock.

The clangs of the acoustic guitar in a stunning open tuning delight us in “Longer Look”: only voice and guitar; ancestral, primitive, full of harmony. But the sextet returns immediately in full force for the choral “Meeting of the Waters,” which develops one of their characteristic oblique harmonies, where the basic tonality is continuously altered to make the piece perfectly unforgettable, yet splendid. Listen to the instrumental crescendo that leads to the guitar solo, with the congas on the left that “sing” the percussive beauty contained within them.

The atmosphere is destroyed and recomposed differently in the rock blues “Nebulous,” melodically faded, but characterized first by a gigantic guiro that travels spectacularly from right to left during one of the pauses. The long instrumental jam before the end is terrifyingly psychedelic... if you close your eyes, you can imagine yourself in Pompeii with Pink Floyd. Around the knotty and perfect bass of Dave Schools, the other soloists indulge in the chords and notes they want, so long as he keeps them cohesive. Masterpiece, and never a more fitting title.

We recover from such confusion with the more earthly “Monstrosity,” which has the tempo of a boogie but the chords and heartfelt singing of a ballad, a mishmash that Widespread manages with a naturalness only theirs. Even “Time Waits” is quite oblique, with chords that sometimes wander in a jazzy way and Graham Bell’s mobile voice, in a confidential mode, following them like a little dog.

The album concludes with the brisk country rock “Travelin’ Man,” sung in duet by the frontman and the keyboardist, who does not give up on the little oddities of the house. On this occasion: a very “off” seventh chord at the end of each chorus, an extended and psychedelic finale, and a subsequent instrumental ghost rack, with the tape artfully slowed down to make the groove clumsy and unreal.

Great.

P.S.: It is the first album without founding guitarist Michael Houser, gone to hopefully better worlds than this, due to the usual incurable illness. The new guitarist, George McConnel, is more technical and precise, less personal and overwhelming. Widespread loses something and gains others with him, who, however, will only last a couple of albums.