If anyone can write a concept album it's Willy Vlautin of the alt.country Oregon band Richmond Fontaine, whose first novel, The Motel Life, was as dark and violent as anything written by Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, The Road) or Elmore Leonard.
Previous Richmond Fontaine albums have had themes too: The Fitzgerald was based on Waitsean, marginal characters around a seedy casino where Vlautin had lived, and We Used to Think the Freeway Sounded Like a River was a character-driven collection about outsiders.
The High Country goes for the big sweep, a cinematic story in song about a trailer park girl in a northwest logging town who gets pregnant then married to a young logger, loses the baby, then disappears.
Framed like a detective novel (the opener outlines the story arc with the blunt, spoken word "I'm just ****ed, Arlene") this unfurls like a multi- viewpoint radio play with spoken word passages enacting the action, sound effects, distant voices, snatches of songs from the radio, menacing ambient music and so on.
Because the songs propel the narrative you can't hit random play or sample a bit here and there, so this won't be easy for most.
