But Wall offers little time for reflection, fading out shortly after the cathartic and inevitable round of gunfire in the song’s final couplet. “Kate McCannon” is told through one of folk music’s oldest tropes: the dual love song/murder ballad. Wall’s aversion to narrative spans the record and makes these songs a lot more hallucinogenic than their earthy arrangements suggest. It’s a fitting introduction to an album built from small details, conjuring larger pictures with what’s left out. Instead, he closes with a rousing repetition of the chorus, proudly naming the few possessions he owns. Wall never explains how he wound up there (“For now we’ll say I had no place to go,” he offers) or what happens next-there’s not even a second verse. The album begins with “Thirteen Silver Dollars,” a spirited ramble that finds our narrator lying in the snowy streets of Saskatchewan before a cop comes to take him away. They gain their intensity from his vivid, fragmented storytelling. Rarely ever rising above a gentle rumble, Wall’s songs zoom in on haunting scenes and resolve in unexpected ways.
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