Album Review: Beachwood Sparks – The Tarnished Gold

The age-old country themes of love, loneliness, death and catharsis pour from the album, from the fingers and mouths of the players, and it is nothing but heartfelt conviction that stays the hand of cliché and sentimentality. ‘Forget The Stall’ opens the album, acoustic guitar and pedal steel setting the tone from the outset. ‘This goes out to my good friend’ says Gunst at the beginning of ‘Sparks Fly Again’, and as the song breaks free from its country beat into a psychedelic mid-section it’s easy to imagine this opening statement to be directed at Parsons. Most indebted to the late singer is the mid-album ‘Talk About Lonesome’, a rumination on lost love where the mood of the song betrays the melancholic subject matter.

The Tarnished Gold is an album that revels in the many guises of heartache, from the honeymoon flushes of new love to the codeine and whiskey-soaked aftermath. ‘I grew tired of carrying a hardened heart/ So I opened up my arms and let it in/ So I laid my body down in the funeral parlour/ Burned it up in love and the flames grew higher’ sings Gunst on the title track, alongside one of those instantly recognisable ascending three-note country progressions. Themes move from elation to despair throughout the album, and often in the same song with the joyful, jangling guitars betraying the downbeat lyrics, and vice-versa. On ‘Earl Jean’, acoustic and electric guitar lines intertwine, the song soaring as Gunst sings ‘I love a happy ending/ It’s lonely where you’re standing’.

A hazy and muted ‘Leave That Light On’, reminiscent of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Albatross’, sees the singer pleading in hushed tones ‘Please leave that light on‘, as if sung through the languid fog of downers. Then there’s the stoic acceptance of inevitability of ‘Alone Together’ with Gunst finding redemption of sorts, and the music soars again – ‘I was wrong/ I thought it was real/ But lonely I feel/It’s not mine to own/ So I pay it no mind.’ ‘Water From The Well’ continues this theme of cleansing, an addition to the pantheon of gospel and folk songs in the same vein. It flows along nicely, and it’s certainly not the first or last time we’ll hear lyrics about rivers joining the sea.

The recording process of The Tarnished Gold is reflected in ‘Nature’s Light’, a folky and organic number – sounds made from voice and wood, a song about home, roots, hearth and family. Beachwood Sparks have expanded to a seven-piece line-up for this album with original drummer Jimi Hey returning to help out and Gunst’s wife and bassist Brent Rademaker’s brother both contributing. As well as Sperske’s ex-employer Ariel Pink also featuring, Dan Horne takes over pedal steel duties from Scher and Thom Monahan returns eleven years later to produce after his work on their 2001 release Once We Were Trees. ‘Those notes remind me of my home/ Not one of just wood and stone/ But of hand and leaf and branch and bone/ Where words don’t point the way to truth/ The sky and sea meet in the blue/ All I want to see is you’ sings Gunst amidst this gathering of family and friends, instantly calling to mind The Band’s cossetted tenure at Woodstock and Big Pink.

With The Tarnished Gold, Beachwood Sparks have delivered an album indebted to those Sixties and Seventies artists that have informed their music. Familiar yet contemporary, at times a Teenage Fanclub comparison can spring to mind just as easily as a Hillman or Parsons, with uplifting flourishes and jarring psyche swirls punctuating the bright guitar work and wistful pedal steel. The Cosmic American Cowboy though spreads his over-arching influence all over this one. ‘We are made of the stars‘ says Gunst on ‘No Queremos Oro’. It’s difficult not to smile.