Review & Full Album Stream: Wino, Forever Gone
Posted in audiObelisk, Reviews on June 24th, 2020 by JJ Koczan
[Click play above to stream Wino’s Forever Gone in full. Album is out Friday on Ripple Music with preorders here for US and here for EU.]
It is overwhelming to consider the tumult of the decade between Scott “Wino” Weinrich‘s 2010 debut solo album, Adrift (review here), and this follow-up, Forever Gone. The dissolution of Shrinebuilder, the acoustic collaboration with German singer-songwriter Conny Ochs, the tenure fronting Saint Vitus that ended in an arrest in Norway for amphetamine possession and subsequent ban from Schengan Area countries in Europe — which was a five-year sentence, but still resulted in his being unable to tour there last year — as well as reunions first with The Obsessed, then Spirit Caravan, then Spirit Caravan becoming The Obsessed and changing its lineup before putting out their first album in two decades. Through all of this and the inevitable whatever-it-was I left out, Weinrich continued to perform solo acoustic shows, and so the notion of a second album was never completely absent, but apparently it took some doing to make it happen.
But if it was Weinrich‘s goal to channel living through those years into the craft and performance of Forever Gone — released through Ripple Music where Adrift was on Exile on Mainstream — it comes through as a palpable emotional and atmospheric weight in songs like the opening title-track, “No Wrong” and “Lavender and Sage,” and the penultimate “Was, Is and Shall Be,” the latter two of which feature guest vocals. Thinking of arrangements as compared to the 2010 offering, Forever Gone feels much less restricted to a guy-and-guitar aesthetic. There’s the slide in “You’re So Fine,” drums and electrics on “Dark Ravine,” an electric solo woven into early highlight “Taken” and vocal layering used sporadically throughout. The effect this has is to make minimalist moments like “The Song’s at the Bottom of the Bottle” and “Dead Yesterday” — which if nothing else certainly feels like a thematic answer to “Forever Gone” itself — stand out all the more, conveying the loneliness, regret and contemplation at root in some of the material while still leaving room for hope in more expansive pieces like “Dark Ravine” or the closing Joy Division cover “Isolation,” which comes through almost as a full-band, with drums, electric and acoustic guitars, and multiple layers of voice.
That finale should be readily enough familiar to those who’ve kept up with Wino‘s solo work live in the last eight or so years, and it’s also one of several of the pieces throughout Forever Gone that draws from the Wino & Conny Ochs collaborations. “Isolation” appeared on their Labour of Love 2012 Latitudes session (discussed here), while “Dead Yesterday” and “Dark Ravine” appeared on that same year’s full-length debut (also on Exile on Mainstream), Heavy Kingdom (review here), and “Crystal Madonna” and “Forever Gone” itself featured on Freedom Conspiracy (review here) in 2015. As Forever Gone is serving double-duty as the beginning of a series of acoustic-based Ripple releases called ‘Blood and Strings,’ it’s not like anyone’s trying to pass these off as brand new — Wino isn’t “getting one over” or anything like that — but the familiarity of some of the material and the refresh on the arrangements gives them new life and while obviously Weinrich is at the center of all the material, the work of producer Frank “The Punisher” Marchand isn’t to be ignored when it comes to the finished product of Forever Gone.
Whether it’s intertwining electrics and acoustics at the start of “Taken” or giving a sense of space through subtle vocal echo thereafter, or highlighting the classic blues rock feel of “You’re So Fine” to bring a moment of joy between the more melancholic “Dead Yesterday” and “Crystal Madonna,” each strum is as crisp as it wants to be, and Wino‘s voice comes through with no less instrumental detail, the product of decades of living and singing hard manifest in making the languid melody of “Lavender and Sage” feel like something earned rather than simply adopted as a stylistic choice. Part of that of course stems from the narrative of Wino‘s career itself, but if ever there was a place for such context and for his personality to come through as sharply as it does, Forever Gone would seem to be it, and Marchand is due much credit in making that happen.
Weinrich‘s in-genre legacy is well established through his work in The Obsessed, Saint Vitus, The Hidden Hand, etc., and doesn’t need to be recounted here anymore than it already has. What comes through most on Forever Gone is that, rather than seeing an artist resting on his laurels and self-indulgently pushing through 11 songs and 45 minutes of assembled material, Wino here brings the unmistakable character of songwriting and passion of performance that has made him the figurehead he is. It is an indelible mark of his work and whether it’s in the relatively uptempo version here of “Dark Ravine” or in “Crystal Madonna” — which was a highlight of Freedom Conspiracy and is one on Forever Gone as well — it is the foundation on which these songs, new and old alike, are built. With the variety in arrangements and guests in and out adding to Weinrich‘s vocals and guitar, there is a sense of completeness about Forever Gone that feels progressed forward from Adrift even as it stays loyal to the form.
It is impossible to know where the next decade might take Wino as a performer or a human being, but with this collection, his place as America’s Godfather of Doom is reaffirmed even as he breaks the confines of doom itself; though anyone who tells you Forever Gone isn’t heavy needs to recheck their definition of the word. As vibrant as this material is, and as much as it brims with the passion and creative intensity that brought it to bear in the studio, there continues to be a heft that is either underlying or at the fore, moving no less dynamically than the arrangements of the songs throughout, and no less crucial to the understanding of what this record is. I’ve said before, on plenty of occasions, there’s only one Wino. That’s where the count remains. And if Forever Gone is his way of marking the passage of the last 10 years, it is of due substance to be up to that task.
