California-based composer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer William Ryan Fritch has been busy. Back in May he released New Words For Old Wounds, a brand new album on Lost Tribe Sound. Now we’re barely halfway through June and he’s back with another album, Clean War, on the Arizona label. In fact the former was the last of an eleven-album subscription series-cum bold-artistic-statement, an achievement that will surely come to be viewed as Fritch’s magnum opus. Clean War sees the him create something typically dense and atmospheric, what the label describe as “a woozy descent into some of the dirtiest psych music around”. As with all Lost Tribe Sound releases, Clean War is an album in the truest sense of the word. This is not three singles and some generic filler, but lovingly-crafted art. Its artistic aims are wonderfully captured in the accompanying information:
“Clean War arrives during uncertain times – hollow leaders, blurred friends and foes, a heavy mix apathy and aggression divide much of our society, a need to label people, places, and ideas so quickly in order to usher them away to our like and dislike piles with no more than a crooked word from our sponsors.”
Clean War addresses a wide range of societal issues, all linked in ways that become clear as you listen and digest what’s going on. Take for example the ruminations on war and art, of how our short 21st Century attention spans reduce all art (and especially music) to brief summations which are quickly lost in the tempest of the internet, and how the same willingness to forget and move on extend to the life and (admittedly mostly) death concerns of war. Like all great artists, William Ryan Fritch focuses on questions and personal feelings, apparently fully aware that preaching answers to questions as big as these is futile. Instead, he shakes loose his thoughts and emotions. As the label put it “[he] must purge these dark psalms in order to not be consumed by them”.
‘Squander’ opens the album with atmospheric drone, sounding like echoes of some catastrophic event reaching out from the past, echoes we’d perhaps do well to heed when looking toward the future. ‘Storms’ gathers like an ominous weather front, eventually bursting forth in a great thudding, clanging downpour.
“For with the clearest skies, and the most sterile whites…
Are when looks are most deceiving and danger is most nigh.
May it’s shroud of dank and dark surround us still.
We pray for storms”
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‘Blue Birth’ sounds downright ghostly, with its swirling atmosphere and disembodied handclaps. Fritch’s vocals are initially wordless but eventually coalesce into decipherable lyrics fraught with a macabre mysticism (“A blue birth thrust into the world too soon / A red death culled from this life too soon”). ‘Our Strange Progression’ begins slow and creepy and blooms into something grand and somehow wonky, its lyrics like something from a newly-translated classical text, while a ghostly choir opens ‘A Slow Collapse’, the track rumbling to life with galloping drums and dissonant instrumentation. Fritch’s vocals sit at the centre, floating out in all directions, the softest, smoothest element of all. That’s followed by ‘The Fall’, another instrumental that sounds like little more than wind in the branches of a tree, while ‘Protracted’ is grand and sweeping, like the motion of a turbulent sea.
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The intro to the title track sounds somehow haunted, murmurs and wails and squeaking iron gates and spooky midnight clocktower tolls. Eventually Fritch’s vocals enter and the track takes on a Gothic majesty which aims headlong at the themes I mentioned previously.
“There is no clean war.
There is no absolute truth
There is no victimless deed
but we are deaf to the echoes of each”
‘Aftermath’ is about as apt a title as I could think of for the closing track. It sounds like the soundtrack to dust-flecked film of the devastation of some needless war, injured soldiers and orphaned children and cities reduced to rubble.
In short, the album is a triumph. It’s wonderful to know that there are still people out there concerned with more than Souncloud playcounts and impressing PR drones. William Ryan Fritch is an artist, and as such his work demands effort on the part of the listener as well as the creator. For all the gloom and fog present on the album, it still clings to a sense of hope, meaning it’s a rewarding and ultimately heartening experience. As they’ve put this last thought so eloquently, I’ll leave the guys at Lost Tribe Sound have the last word:
“Clean War is an undeniably human album, proudly displaying it wounds and disgust…Yet in the mire, a gentler tone resides, one that knows there is still good in humanity. He leaves us with a solemn prayer – a call to be decent to one another, to be more than hollow beasts, to upset a future of poor repetitious behaviors.”
Clean War is out now on Lost Tribe Sound and you can get it from the William Ryan Fritch Bandcamp page.