It required me listening to ‘Call By Night’ a couple of time before I finally really comprehended it and aprecciated it because of its contents, both musical than lyrical. Wymond Miles is well known not only because he is the guitarist of the San Francisco iconic band of the ‘new garage rock’ movement, The Fresh & Onlys, but also because his solo career, that it’s actually very prolific and at this point, with the publishing of the third album, it’s possibly arrived to what we could define an its own dimension. ‘Call By Night’ (out by a label that it’s a synonym of quality as the Sacred Bones Records) it’s a work possibly less baroque than the previous solo releases by Wymond Miles (and this is actually so good) who this time realised an album that in practice it’s a true musical melodrama. Most of the songs were written on the piano and all of the songs are permeated by serious tones and an austerity that made me think about that great songwriter who actually was Leonard Cohen (may God bless him). Finding the lyrical contents from the happenings of his youth and writing about the places he grew up, working-class small towns of the American West, he evocates in this album that lost landscape and the difficult situations of that context, the issues of fatherhood, the police brutality, realising finally an album that we couldn’t actually define as a pop album and that is far from what he previously proposed as solo singer and songwriter and also with The Fresh & Onlys. ‘Call By Night’: definitely a desperate album but with true contents (and far from the excess of – for example – ‘Berlin’ by Lou Reed) for lonely hearts who could possibly find in this songs some good companion and human warmth. Something everyone really need.
Rating: 7/10
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