Ryan Bingham has long had a knack for crafting grittily potent narratives with southwestern atmosphere that alternately brood and rock. His fifth full-length release, Fear and Saturday Night, is arguably the most cohesive, gripping wrangling of his rowdy and restless tendencies since first rising to country-rock prominence with the Dead Horses at his side for his strong debut, Mescalito, and follow-up Roadhouse Sun. Where the quieter and ballad-driven Junky Star capitalized on the strength of his Academy Award-winning song, “The Weary Kind” (from Crazy Heart), and his 2012 solo debut, Tomorrowland, was more scattershot, sprawling, and built around anthems, Fear and Saturday Night finds Bingham sounding even more comfortable and confident in his tastes and craftsmanship than he has in a few albums.
He’s still
traipsing through the same well-worn cactus-and-bluebonnet terrain that has
infused all of his work (and most of the music of his outlaw-country and
border-poet heroes), but there’s a hard-won vitality seeping out the edges of
nearly song on Fear and Saturday Night
that solidifies Bingham as a necessary underdog in a genre that’s never really
a hot commodity these days but never truly goes out of style, either. Tunes
like the opening track “Nobody Knows My Trouble,” “My Diamond Is Too Rough,”
and the title track exquisitely capture a stubborn, outlaw spirit driven by
romanticism and at odds with the economic hardships and oppressive modern
America outside the confines of a man, his woman, and whatever family he has
left. That same spirit also ignites the sparks on the more combustible,
up-tempo songs, most notably on the carefree Tex-Mex lovers’ joyride through
class and red state/blue state divisions on “Adventures of You and Me” and the
galvanizing sweep of “Island in the Sky” and its buoyant chorus. Other tunes
like “Top Shelf Drug” and “Radio” tackle genre tropes that have been written
and sung hundreds, if not thousands, of times before, but Bingham’s soulful
humanity and the muscularity and nuanced playing of his new backing band (Daniel
Sproul (Rose Hill Drive) on lead guitar, bassist Shawn Davis (Beck, Juanes),
and drummer Nate Barnes (Rose Hill Drive)) give the songs sturdy legs. Even if
they are new entries into the rock and roll standards of comparing sex to a
drug high or lamenting the music on the radio (although here, Bingham sings
from more of a High Fidelity approach of listening to sad songs that hurt too
much to hear rather than merely opining about the soullessness of the modern
radio charts), they earn their right to fight for a loyal audience.
Fear and Saturday Night is the product of an award-winning,
still-young songwriter and musician who retreated to Western solitude and the
great wide open to comb through a personal history of frequent transience,
love, and the deaths of his parents. What results is a red-blooded album of
genuine emotion laced with just the right combination of flannel-shirted,
shit-kicking roadhouse rock and tear-streaked and liquored-up anguish that
surfaces to tighten its hold after the neon light flicks off and all the outcasts
stumble back out into the streets to face the world at large.
Fear and Saturday Night is out now
(released January 20, 2014) on Bingham’s own Axster Bingham Records label
distributed by Thirty Tigers/RED.
Listen to "Broken Heart Tattoos" via Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy
Listen to "Broken Heart Tattoos" via Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy
