Feast of Wire

In the late 1990s the Americana duo of John Convertino and Joey Burns created a form of desert blues inspired not by the sands of the Sahara but by the cactus-strewn badlands of the Sonoran desert straddling the Mexican/Arizonan border. Released in 2003, Feast of Wire was the duo's third album and an expansion of their early mariachi-influenced stylings into an expansive desert noir hybrid that mixed a south-of-the-border Mexicali vibe with indigenous Americana flavours that spanned country, jazz, folk and rock like the theme for an imaginary spaghetti western. Songs such as ‘Sunken Waltz’, ‘Across the Wire’ and ‘No Doze’ convey a sense of border-crossing nomadic migration over a sound-bed of guitars, accordions, mandolin, bowed banjo, pedal steel, pump organ, violins, trumpets and trombones. Twenty years on, Feast of Wire still sounds like a landmark record from its cinematic, windswept instrumentals to its burnished and anguished ballads, and this expanded anniversary edition includes a second disc featuring a previously unreleased live recording of a concert in Stockholm shortly after the album's release. It includes cracking versions of nine of the studio album's 16 songs, plus a sensational trumpet-driven cover of ‘Alone Again or’ from Love's sainted 1967 milestone Forever Changes.