Willy DeVille
Pistola

THE REVIEW

...and even the great gypsy has left us. One of the most unconventional artists of rock, with his enigmatic air and expression of "...got you again this time." A music explorer, never satisfied with finding and experimenting with new sounds. Able to merge Rock 'n' roll, blues, soul, cajun music, folk, and Latin music, Tex-Mex, and French singer-songwriter style into a mix always original but so attached to roots music.

He passed away on August 6, 2009, from a sudden pancreatic cancer, in a hospital in New York. This "PISTOLA" will remain his last studio testimony, released in 2008. An honest album in line with his latest productions.

Musically born in New York, in the midst of the punk era, he was a great frequenter of the most popular venue at the time in the Big Apple. Around CBGB revolves all the New York music of that time and it takes little to also include Willy and his band the MINK DE VILLE in the punk cauldron. But it was all very daring. DeVille in his musical search will show his great instinct in knowing how to put in his music the musical influences of the places he will frequent in life, whether they are New Orleans, Paris, Berlin, or Italy and the title "pistola" is there to prove it.

Charismatic like few others on stage, he knew how to embody the exact idiom of the traveling and wandering musician and his almost gypsy-like look was there to visually prove it. The cover of Pistola shows him pensive with his thin mustache and tattoos that speak so much of a lived life.

"So so Real" starts, a nice direct ballad very Dylan-like in singing with the chorus that sticks to your head from the very first listen. In the following "Been there done that", a funky reggae with lots of horns, shows us what he is capable of when he plays with the most disparate musicalities. "When I get home" is a ballad, which now listened to just days after his passing is even more evocative and melancholic than it already was before. His husky and dark voice does the rest. Among the slow Tex-Mex of "The band played on" which feels much like the frontier and catapults us into warm and sleepy landscapes, there's the cajun-blues of "You got the world in your hands" that transports us to the banks of the Mississippi.

The very '50s ballad "I remember the first time" gives him back to us romantic and dreamer only to turn back into the devil's child in the blues "I'm gonna do something the devil never did", a slow and hypnotic voodoo mantra in which he tells us about his sins. Not forgetting the two spoken songs where his deep voice almost gives chills and the cover "Louise" by Paul Siebel.

This album can very well be a small summary of DeVille's musical career, perhaps distant from masterpieces like "Coupe De Grace" (1981) or "Miracle" (1987) but a good start, to then go back and rediscover the art of this great gypsy of rock music. FAREWELL.