“Western Days” has a 50’s crooner hint like a ballad from Chris Isaak, although Gabriel Mintz’s voice comes from a different element. The song that opens Volume One has these guitars that lurk in the background, reeling and electrifying like very distant lightning on the horizon. And so Mintz introduces us to himself, a songwriter who covers much territory as he slides around that horizon, never quite coming center on your map, so that you can never be certain that you’ve described your destination.
“Sofa Bed” picks up the Isaak beat, echoes in a rockabilly feel, and lets the track cook along on Trent Moorman’s drums. Yet, it’s the sprawling, brooding “Desert Sky” that perhaps most gives way to the comparisons to Jim Morrison with Mintz’s voice taking on the ethereal, Lizard King poetic, spoken-jazz chant. That shifts the whole album in a different direction on the compass. The tempo comes on a bit more country-like for “Spinning,” but we do get a chance to stay in the ethereal. “Firefly” completes this trilogy of what seem like Morrison-inspired jaunts.
Funky, fuzzy bass and guitar break up the album for “Safeway.” Then “Miles High” brings back a country feel for a stomp that opens up things again to rockabilly hints and moving ahead towards a straight-forward road. Things slow to a crawl for “Atom Bomb,” which feels the weakest here. The album closes with a return to brooding on a grooving vamp for “Excitement Shows,” and Morrison shows up again.
