Search - The Wells, Robert Loss, Bill Heingartner :: Outcasts Will Make a Strong Nation

Hailing from Columbus, Ohio, the Wells began as a trio in 2003 featuring Andy Gard (bass, vocals), Bill Heingartner (drums, vocals), and Robert Loss (guitar, lead vocals). Their first release in May 2004 was an EP entitled New Death Valley Blues, described in Columbus' The Other Paper as "rustic Appalachian folk music and drawling country twang with a churning rock sensibility underneath." Which sounds like a good thing. Local music website Cringe had this to say, via its proprietor, Joel Treadway: "The Wells play a rustic and rowdy mesh of Nick Cave meets Richard Thompson influenced acoustic guitar driven fables and stories."

Building on an increasingly colorful musical palette, the Wells explore wide territory on Nation. Lyrically, most of the songs are ballads, stories ranging from the guilt-ridden O'Brien in "Hanging Tree" to an old farmer's attempt to sell off his daughter into marriage in "Sixteen Coaches Long." Folk and blues motifs collide, like "shake sugaree" (from Elizabeth Cotton's song, not the Dead) and "if tomorrow was Christmas Day" (from Robert Johnson's "Hellhounds on My Trail"); literary references (The Sound and the Fury; Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory), mix with fantastic tall tales like "Big Tent Revival" and enigmatic whodunnits as in "Knockdown Dragout". The album's title refers to the songs' characters who, at one point in time, find themselves to be exiles from their lovers, family, and themselves, as we all do from time to time. This mish-mash finds sympathy in the sounds on the record: folk and blues melodies, rock abrasion, punk concussions, and sounds at times swampy and elsewhere crystal clear; drums thud, the bass greases your wheel, and through it all you have the rough vocal stylings of Robert Loss and close harmonies from the other guys. Bill Heingartner even takes a lead vocal on "Three Day Drunk." It's a party!

www.myspace.com/wellsrock