by David Wilikofsky
I’ll admit it: I missed No Winners In The Blues the first time around. The album was originally released on the now defunct Patient Sounds Intl back in 2019, at this point nearly a lifetime ago. At the time, Wes Tirey had been doing semi-improvised performances with guitarist Shane Parish for a few years. When scheduling conflicts prevented other collaborators from recording with Tirey, he decided to do an entire album with Parish in that same style. The document of that partnership is at once a homage to folk tradition and a swirlingly hallucinatory take on the genre.
On No Winners In The Blues, Tirey casts himself as a classic folk troubadour. Atop simple, unadorned accompaniment, he sings in a distinctive baritone about the lovelorn, the lonely, the down and out. A man reminisces about his former flame and wonders how she is doing. Another ponders his single existence where he just “kills time” as all his friends get married and have kids. When troubles aren’t weighing our narrators down, the threat of them lingers on the horizon. If Roscoe Holcomb played the high lonesome sound, No Winners In The Blues is the low lonesome sound.
At first I wondered how this record fit in with the vision of Full Spectrum, the label who has lovingly reissued it; I generally associate them with longform experimental soundscapes rather than singer-songwriter albums. But the more I listened, the more it began to make sense. Sonically there is a sense of sameness to the eight songs here, but rather than feeling monotonous, their sonic consistency begins to blur everything together. It’s a car ride though a never changing landscape; Parish’s improvised fragments become dots on the horizon, oases that may be real or simply a figment of your imagination. Call it what you will: cosmic Americana, psychedelia, folk. At times, all feel like apt descriptors for the dusty, sprawling landscapes of the mind that the duo conjure up here. There may be no winners in the blues, but being down and out rarely sounds this beautiful.