Will Hoge – The Wreckage

The titular word of Will Hoge’s latest offering – The Wreckage – would seem at first an unveiled reference to his horrible vehicular accident last year, a scooter-meets-van mess on a Nashville street that left him in 10 months of physical therapy and recovery of his spirit also. He was scooting home from the studio at the time with about half of his new album recorded.

Those dark days behind now, Hoge’s actually back to what’s been his sonic cup of tea – closed relationships and open roads. Turns out that Wreckage tips its hat not to his near-fatal accident but to yet another round of relational shrapnel.

The references to his painful wreck remain implicit throughout this record (released almost a year to the day of its occurrence) is a triumph of Hoge’s craft and his will to not regard the episode romantically in the rearview. Climbing back into the studio to record eight months after that left him temporarily blind, Hoge treads familiar territory: “Highway Wings” arrives as part deux to 2007’s “The Highway’s Home.” He’s got girl on the phone, she’s pining for him, and he’s once again that restless nomad. “I need to hear that blacktop sing, underneath my highway wings,” he wails.

True, most of the themes are themselves well-traveled for this self-proclaimed “burned-out junkie truck-stop saint.” Tepid as the lyrics are at times, some songs are saved by the guy’s winsome croon. It’s that rare treat where a voice sounds so smooth and rugged at the same time. “Once more, with feeling,” would never be a command doled out to Will Hoge. By nature he has it in spades.

“Hard To Love” opens The Wreckage with a driving piano hook and Hoge’s simple, memorable line, “It’s hard to love, but it’s easy to hold.” Coupled with “Long Gone”’s thrashing country rock, it’s a notably frenetic 1-2 punch for Hoge. That’s brought down a few rungs with the title track, a song that, with its stillness, Hoge’s said he couldn’t have begun to sing ahead of his accident: “‘The Wreckage’ is one of the favorite songs I’ve ever sung,” Hoge said in the record’s promo bio. “I couldn’t have sung this physically before … because my voice just wasn’t suited to how quiet it is.” “Another night here lonely as a tomb,” he offers at the song’s outset.

Indeed, despite the remarkably uptempo feel to the music on The Wreckage, it’s a moody, brooding album at its core, in the words. Hoge’s handlers claim it breaks new ground for him musically, one of those tried clichés in record-label materials that’s marginally true here. He’s always been long on the melancholy, if it’s packed into barroom rock more than ever here.

“Favorite Waste of Time” sounds shamelessly like a jouncier Jakob Dylan track, more upbeat in the Wallflowers vein than anything on Dylan’s sad-eyed Seeing Things release last year. “Goodnight/Goodbye” is aided mightily by its he said/she said vocals, the latter provided by a silver-throated Ashley Monroe. She and Hoge make clarion harmonies. “Just Like Me” plugs in and rocks out more than anything Hoge’s done to date. Despite the cost at which it came, he’s never sounded so freed up.

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Tagged as: country rock, Nashville

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