Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD), Hat, T-Shirt/Shirt
No Ordinary Crown, the new solo effort from Texas-based songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Will Johnson, is a short album that plays like a long tour from a seasoned road dog: slow and sure, the familiar stretches paved with cold memories and punctuated by brief moments of searing clarity. No Ordinary Crown is a folk album from an artist who is determined not to shake his alt-rock pedigree, nor his novelistic pursuits. Johnson’s been plying his trade as a musician since the early ‘90s, making his name with his previous Dallas/Denton bands Funland, Centro-matic, and South San Gabriel, weaving alternative credits as a folk artist and fiction author.
The opening track, “Along The Runner (No Ordinary Crown),” sets a close, pensive mood. The lyrics cryptically articulate the album title, guitar wailing in the distant background like a lone wolf, pedal steel yipping at its heels like a coyote. The tenderness is dialed deeper on standout cut “In Granada.” Johnson intimately sing-speaks around interlocking melodies finger-plucked on a range of instruments and a bowed cello thrum. This gentle string pulse locks in before an eighth-note percussive clack arrives, subtly but forcefully. Once the drums kick in fully, Johnson’s front-of-mix vocals disappear, replaced by a garbled monologue patched through the background like a voicemail, the track ending in reverse, the guitar tracked backwards.
Lyrically, No Ordinary Crown is an imagistic recollection of familiar places and faces glimpsed afresh, as if the songs are unlocking transient memories. It’s sparingly packed with poignant, oblique words that are evocative without being particularly descriptive. When Johnson sings “And when it gets to be/ That you need a settling scene/ Or something true/ Or a savage attack upon something serene/ Well, follow through,” on “Conduct,” the falsetto ooh-ooh-ooh’s that follow in his weathered register carry almost as much semantic weight as the words on the lyric sheet.
The soul of No Ordinary Crown is refracted most directly on mid-album instrumental “Alta (Warped Kite).” A string-bent guitar melody wends and twists over plodding toms and dramatic open chords, as a deeply groaning cello circles below. It ends with another grainy, barely decipherable dictaphone recording; a reflection of Johnson’s process of assembling the album as a series of snippets captured “on short tours where I could hear my thoughts a bit more clearly.” No Ordinary Crown runs barely over half an hour, but its esoteric messaging and reverb-rich soundscapes linger well after the album ends.
