Perhaps for a musician like Warren, who has enjoyed a long career playing with many successful bands, making bleak, insular but obviously very personal records like these is a kind of necessary phase. On the basis of The Wayfarer, however, it is tempting to hope that it will be a short one.His diverse musical career has seen Warren go from operating at the interface of rhythm and noise as punk-primitive electronicist Echoboy, to playing guitar with Mark Lanegan. It’s the latter whose shadow looms longest over The Wayfarer, Warren clearly finding his true self in the blues, “twistin’ guilty and burning in chains”, as he puts it in “Wasteland”.
He’s an accomplished guitarist with an ear for the dramatic, his electrified country-blues lines and slide guitar accompanied here by skeletal percussion that sounds like manacles rattling vainly. His vocals veer from 1950s crooner to 1960s rocker – he’s like Richard Hawley’s accursed brother – while the patina of reverb, analogue hiss and occasional chirping crickets gives the album an authentically fatalistic air.
