THE WESTIES
West Side Stories
WestiesMusic.com
* * * *
Forget a grain, when you've been reviewing music for as long
as I have, you learn to take PR come-ons and pullout quotes with an entire cave
of salt. For once, though, someone calls like it is. The Westies are the
brainchild of singer songwriter Michael McDermott, whose repertoire is aptly
described as "songs of love, betrayal, murder, hope, and redemption."
His partnership with backup singer Heather Horton forms the core of The
Westies. Toss in some talented sessions players and West Side Stories is a dark, brooding, and raw slice of real life.
Well what else would one expect from a songwriter who names his ensemble after
a Hell's Kitchen gang from the '60s/70s who came pretty close to pulling some
hard time of his own. Mix in a dose of the Irish shanachie tradition and filter
it through American outlaw country music and you're on the right track. The
only curve ball is the album title; West
Side Stories has songs set in the Big Apple, but more from its bad core
side, and it detours to places such as Texas, Mississippi, Michigan, and
Wyoming–the latter being the location for the song "Devil," where the
song's anti-hero meets Old Nick "with his jailhouse tattoo and gold teeth
grin" in a cheap bar and leaves with his soul bargained away.
McDermott's emotive and strong voice sounds as if its filtered
through hard living, anguish, and emotions that gestated in the gut, not in
some mythical Valentine-shaped organ. His pas
de deux duet with Horton on "Say It" is a love song, but not the
hearts and coronets variety. Theirs is a dance of passion, but with doubt
firmly in place. And when McDermott reveals "These Dreams About
Trains," his somnolent flights freely mix pleasant dreams and nightmares.
That is to say, his trains carry people rushing home to loved ones, those
fleeing shattered hopes, and even a casket or two. And forget those hokey
country bar songs; McDermott's "Bar" is a place where "I hit the
bottle so hard… it hit me back." Smart stuff. Call it the West Side of New
York by way of hardscrabble West Texas.
Rob Weir
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