Ben Nichols

The Last Pale Light In the West (Rebel Group)

By Lou Battaglia
Published: December 23rd, 2008 | 9:00am

Lucero frontman Ben Nichols steps up with his first solo project, The Last Pale Light In the West, an EP song cycle based around Cormac McCarthy’s grim Western novel, Blood Meridian. Perhaps in an attempt to mimic McCarthy’s sparse prose — or perhaps in an attempt to strip away the familiar layers of Lucero — Nichols relies on bare-boned arrangements with songs rarely utilizing more than three instruments.

An accordion, a pedal steel, and an acoustic guitar are the primary vehicles through which Nichols conjures images of the same blood-soaked Southwest that the Coen Brothers explored so successfully in their production of another McCarthy novel, No Country For Old Men. For Lucero fans this will undoubtedly provide intrigue, as Nichol’s voice (a Memphis take on Kurt Cobain) commands center stage throughout the EP, delivering vignettes about the characters from Blood Meridian and the violence they unfortunately encounter.

Songs like “The Kid" reek of smoky barrooms where patrons hang on to the bar with one hand and their Budweiser with the other, slowly waiting for their legs to give or the sun to come up — whichever happens first. And on songs like “Davy Brown” and “Chambers,” Nichols faithfully recaptures the biblical overtones of McCarthy’s novel, where dirt, despair, and death entwine as ensuing violence stains the desert red.

Despite the fact that the EP feels and sounds like it was recorded extremely quickly — with the absolute minimum of tweaking — the songs themselves are heartfelt and drip with Nichols’ guttural emotions. His trademark snarl delivers lyrical motifs that, while based around McCarthy’s plots, undoubtedly originated in Springsteen’s Nebraska. Standing on the shoulders of McCarthy and Springsteen, Nichols (re)establishes himself as a similar vessel for bleak stories within the dark corners of the faltering American experiment.

With the success of No Country For Old Men, Blood Meridian has been greenlit and The Last Pale Light serves as a musical prelude to the cinematic version due in 2009 — with writer-director Todd Field (Little Children, In the Bedroom) behind the camera. Now the growing audience for this McCarthy-inspired subgenre has a proxy soundtrack to hold them over until the film comes out.

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