Willi Carlisle -- Winged Victory
Bee Delores reviews Winged Victory, Willi Carlisle's exploration of revolution, love, and resistance.
Art is a gift. That’s the sensibility woven into the underpinning of Willi Carlisle’s new album. Beneath Winged Victory, a sequel to last year’s Critterland, there ebbs and flows a provocative danger that seems to ooze from its seam-bursting edges. It’s alarmingly chaotic, sometimes, and other times, it bobs to and fro with the ease of a sailboat on the water.
Carlisle cracks open the record with a cover of “We Have Fed You All for 1000 Years,” anonymously written by an Industrial Workers of the World member. “We have fed you all for a thousand years, and you hail us still unfed,” he warbles, each prickly lyric striking to the heart. “Though there's never a dollar of all your wealth but marks the worker's dead.” Those words perhaps hit harder today than they did decades ago, setting up the album for its crushing load.
“I can think of no better way to set the terms of any argument that I'm going to make than, ‘if, blood is the price of your cursed wealth / by God, we've paid in full,’” Carlisle notes in press materials, citing a particularly cutting line. “I love that it’s a voice from time immemorial that is singing out about one of the oldest issues in all of history. These stories are almost always written by the victor, but here is a rare exception–a possibility.”
With reverence and revolution, two whirling dervishes, the musician commits to the playful balance of the two. Whether it’s the solemn “The Cottonwood Tree” or a reconfiguration of Laveder Country’s “Cryin’ These Cocksucking Tears,” a quirky companion piece to “Big Butt Billy,” there’s a see-saw of the veneration of tradition and a soul-poking daftness. In finding such an equilibrium to life, to people, to the world turning, Carlisle leaves no stone underturn. His exhibition of character is a driving force – “Work is Work,” “Sound and Fury,” and an adaptation of Richard Thompson’s “Beeswing” emerge as a crucial 1-2-3 sucker-punch.
Winged Victory swings as a wrecking ball demolishes what you think you know about this country’s human vastness. There’s sadness; there’s anger; there’s reverence for tradition; and there’s an itch for change. Willi Carlisle carries these as coins in his back pocket, scratched with miles and miles of traveling that’s both admirable and wearisome.
It’s hard to consider Winged Victory as Carlisle’s defining album. But it sure carries the spirit and gumption of Critterland, appropriate companion pieces to one another. Could it have worked as a double album? Absolutely. Yet Winged Victory still stands on its own two feet – unleashing its own musical beauty that few are able to replicate.
