review by Chance Solem-Pfeifer and Jacob Zlomke
Audio Review
Where once Orion Walsh songs seemed to develop from four chords and a troubadour’s suitcase, these days their making appears to be more of a growth than a construction.
The most dramatic tone on the Lincoln folk musician’s newest album takes the form of a shadowy menace, opening with the confessional “I Would,” the balladic “When the Hangman Calls” and the biblical, allegorical title track. Darkness defines the first half of the album, but it’s a black hole that seems to form less by design and more by the evolution and expansion of single licks. Additionally, the songs aren’t interested in themselves or what kind of ennui they produce, each looking through a slightly different mind’s eye at perhaps the same doomsday of personal and spiritual downfall.
The Tale of a Broken Compass marks the seventh time Orion Walsh has answered the annual call of his quiet personal promise to himself to record and release an album each year since 2008. Thematically, it’s a semi-linear, back-and-forth push to reconciliation, beginning with the harrowing personal indictment of “I Would” and ending in a minimal rendition of “Amazing Grace.” And while you can read a redemptive arc on the album, its title is indicative of its interests in exploration.
Because he doesn’t engage in any broad critiques here, Walsh’s wayward sense of direction sends him headlong into drunkard ballads, a reverent cover of a punk song by a deceased former bandmate, and a bouncy, ballroom number about a date that’s just hell to get. The missing links among them all is one of Lincoln’s eminent songwriters with his proclamatory vocals, estimating the meaning of freedom and an enduring interest in making the kazoo into more than a novelty instrument.
So while Walsh says he’s less interested in embodying a concept of the transcontinental rambler than he may have been as a younger man, his songwriting is counterintuitively afforded the opportunity to move off his beaten paths. With nothing singular to convince a listener of here, the music is a new kind of liberated. American highways may allow someone to drive endlessly, but they’re limiting in their own way. The Tale of a Broken Compass is what comes out when an artist stops paying worship to an interstate’s many signs and ventures past its shoulders.
Chance Solem-Pfeifer is Hear Nebraska’s staff writer. If you want to understand Orion Walsh in 2014, visit “First By Water Then By Fire.” Reach Chance at chancesp@hearnebraska.org.