Beauty Angel Queen

Description

Product description Wagon - Beauty Angel Queen .co.uk On their fourth album, the loose aggregation of peripatetic alt-country talents that calls itself Wagon has got a whole lot tighter. Just as the similarly-minded Lambchop album Nixon finds them expanding their musical horizons, so Wagon roped in friends from Nadine, and started dabbling with backwards tapes, keyboards, female vocal backups and horn sections, to create a much more varied and complex tapestry of sounds. Recorded partly in Brooklyn and partly in their former base, St Louis, Beauty Angel Queen represents a huge step forward in terms of confidence and technique, without any significant reduction in the powerful emotional intensity that attracted the cognoscenti to their previous albums. Ben Davis still sounds world-weary and Danny Kathriner still sounds vulnerably enigmatic, but it's the willingness to introduce little touches by guest-players, like Todd Schnitzer's lonesome Silvertone organ on "Amends", or Dave Schramm's simple but perfect electric guitar part in "Broken Lines", that marks this out as a quantum leap for Wagon. --Johnny Black