The honeyed rasp is still there – intact, warm and entrancing. And Walter Salas-Humara‘s songwriting has never been better. This is the killer album many claimed he had in him, though it’s taken him a short twenty-five years or so to make a recording this powerful. His band The Silos was voted Best New American Band by Rolling Stone back in 1987, and many of us who have followed their career over the years have always wondered why these guys never made it big.
My own take on it is that grunge, electronica and hip hop combined forces (unwittingly, and we do mean unwittingly) to downplay some of the most promising musical lights of the past couple of decades. Still, as they say, talent will out. And if there’s any justice in the music world these days, the new solo album Curve and Shake is going to rattle a few critical windows with its sonic pleasures.
These are American songs, and I mean that in the best sense of the word. Salas-Humara, being also a recognized visual artist (he designed the album cover), works into his songs the images of everyday life and love, and the specificity that characterized the work of American poets such as William Carlos-Williams, Gregory Corso, and Ferlinghetti, in which the concrete combines with the ephemeral. For instance, in one of the best songs on the album “Hoping for a Comeback”, Walter writes and sings of such simple pleasures as “strong black coffee” and “smoking a Cohiba”. And in “Complicated”, he uncomplicates things beautifully with the lines “Does it have to be so hard… So many things can go wrong if you try to understand them.”
He divides his time these days between New York and Flagstaff, Arizona and both landscapes inform and infuse the songs with elements of longing for connection. He’s also still very much a member of The Silos, though he will be touring in support of Curve and Shake this fall. For updates on his concert schedule, check here at http://waltersalashumara.com
For the album, Salas-Humara recruited Jerry Joseph and the Jackmormons, the California band Groove Session, as well as Marius Libman of the Portland art rock band Sun Angle, as well as several others. You’ll hear some stinging, brooding guitar work throughout the record as well as some unusual and thoughtful arrangements, particularly on the title cut. As for “I Love That Girl”, well, I love that song and Walter’s courage in creating a work that dares to repeal the the classic “Something In The Way She Moves” with a new and winning perspective on unrequited love.
The album is as original, as understated and as necessary as music gets these days.
