It's amazing how an innocent discussion about Sandy Denny led me to recommending this fabulous album with their equally fabulous and idiosyncratic singer Paula Frazer. Not only that but if I have to be honest, this is the very first time that the album sounds the way it should have sounded way back when I got it first! It was one of the few albums in my collection that never sounded good. This was down to the tremendous but ott production which my room/system could not handle. So it is to my utter amazement that it sounds fantastic now?!?
The review below really nails it on the head, even mentioning my favourite songs too :-) Do yourselves a favour: listen/watch the samples I've posted elsewhere and go out and buy yourselves a copy.
A customer's review:
Back in the mid 90's I was pretty certain about my dislike for country and western music, it probably had something to do with growing up to the docile plod of c&w booming through the wall from the neighbours, and the general notion amongst my peers that c&w was completely naff. In truth I had happily accomodated bits and pieces of music with undertones of c&w almost without realizing it for some time, but then one day I became the owner of the 4AD sampler "Facing The Wrong Way", and suddenly I was confronted with the fantastic The Well by Tarnation. I was confounded: I liked it, but I wasn't supposed to like it, it was the most blatant example of c&w to land in my record collection, and I was drawn irresistably to it. Soon after I owned Gentle Creatures, which, whilst not an instant hit, I warmed to track by track, my confusion amplified.
When Mirador came out, I was living in the Outer Hebrides and I heard Tarnation perform 3 pieces live on my tinny pocket-sized radio, the result being that I absolutely had to track down a copy of the album. Mirador, when I received my copy several weeks later, was an instant hit, and remains one of my favourite alt-country albums all these years on.
Paula Frazer sings with a peculiar, singular voice, parched and spent, or wandering aimlessly through the octaves, or sometimes urgent and focused. Her words are often cryptic, and deal with the torments of love, loneliness and insanity. The music has a beautiful clarity to it, and draws together vibrant mariachi styles with alt-rock, Tom Waitsian clatter, and shades of 50s rock'n'roll to create eerie deserted landscapes for the stories to dwell in. A Place Where I Know, one of my favourites, ambles unsteadily along, charming and off-kilter. Your Thoughts And Mine, another highlight, and a great choice for the album's single, moves majestically, brimming with drama, I am reminded of Love's Alone Again Or, but this piece has more depth and richness. Christine is a spooky slow-motion piece with a gothic quality, ghostly lap-steel presides, half-hearted percussion moves along uneasily and distant strings skreek and pine in the background, whilst the tale is an odd one about a glowing doll that drives poor Christine mad. In stark contrast the graceful Destiny sounds like a classic, tragic love-song, popular along the US-Mexico border regions, that everyone knows by heart from frequent plays on the radio... and yet it isn't, unless it belongs in some parallel universe.
We move through ghost-towns in the desert and dying communities stranded in the 1950's and suspicious of the outside world, with their half-derelict main streets, peeling paint and tumbleweed. Whilst I've never travelled in those regions of the southern US and Mexico, I did live in a comparable backwater in the Canadian prairies and the first-hand experience of that as an outsider resonates with the bleakness of this album in an unsettling but compelling way, still Mirador and I have deeper roots and it is also entwined with many happy memories.
New Country and much of mainstream country and cowboy poetry and all that still makes me nauseous, but a fair bit of alternative country on the other hand appeals to me now, and I can thank Tarnation as the catalyst that got me really looking closer at Americana and confronting some self-imposed restraints. I recommend Mirador wholeheartedly, in particular to fans of Calexico, Sixteen Horsepower and Woven Hand.