Atmosphere is not always easy to come by. But somehow, the Willard Grant Conspiracy -- a Boston-based outfit named after a secluded, woods-hidden street where the band first recorded -- comes by it with an almost off-handed grace. |

Perhaps some of that commodity has to do with the fact that, besides vocalist/lyricist Robert Fisher and multi-instrumentalist Paul Austin, nailing down the group's cast of characters is at best a somewhat murky endeavor. After all, what element serves atmosphere better than mystery? Then, of course, there's the name.

"We felt it was like a conspiracy," remembers Fisher, "because we didn't know who would be playing with us or where we were headed." On the "band's" first album, the just as obscurely titled 3 am Sunday @ Fortune Otto's, released on Fisher's own Dahlia Records label, the inside jacket states that "anyone who tells you they played on this, probably did." Likewise, the group's gorgeously disquieting new disc, Flying Low (Slow River/Rykodisc), doesn't offer many clues either -- although Fisher claims the ambiguity is intentional for pragmatic, rather than dramatic, reasons.

"I keep it vague on the record because if, in some cases, contractually the musicians can't be on the album, it makes it easier on them," he says with a smile. "But it's not like I'm trying to make it a big, mysterious thing." If the deluge of fawning U.K. press and a steadily gathering groundswell of support here in the States is any indication, the Willard Grant Conspiracy won't be a mystery much longer.

During its recent twenty-six-date European tour (where Flying Low was first released earlier this year) WGC played to packed houses everywhere, receiving accolades in U.K. rock 'zines from Melody Maker to the New Musical Express to Uncut (the latter of which justifiably called Flying Low a "masterpiece of lovelorn desperation"). Though Fisher modestly points out that most of those sold-out U.K. dates were in support of other better-known headliners -- like WGC's Boston neighbors Come -- that simply doesn't explain why so many people camped out early to hear the band, taking up their territories around the stage. And listening hard.

"In Europe, promoters would come up to us and buy a CD instead of just asking for a free one, and then they'd ask us for a signature. We were shocked by that, but people are really music fans there," Fisher says. "I mean, I know Ryko has a great name and reputation, but we're a strange little band. It's all about mandolins and squeeze boxes as opposed to three guitars and feedback."

Even though it's he who first coined it, Fisher's not so sure he likes the term "swamp noir" being used to describe WGC's brand of music. True, Flying Low is drenched in dusky sepia-tones. It's a mostly deserted world of long, lingering shadows where guys like Nick Cave and Mark Eitzel brood in a half-light that's either salvation or damnation -- a distinction that depends solely on whether you think being alone is solitude or isolation. A world where the songs thread through musty rooms and gather there like settling smoke.

"But we're not really swampy," Fisher notes. "The album's all about urban, modern relationships and desperation and longing." The topic that fascinates Fisher most as a songwriter is personal struggle, human fallibility. And on songs like "Bring the Monster Inside" and "House Is Not a Home," he writes with an almost frightening frankness and intimacy. There's a kind of palpable, exhilarating horror to these, as well as many other of WGC's, songs. "I guess it's the same thing that makes good movies good and good books good," Fisher says. "Because everybody's got something in their life that they're trying to overcome." And sometimes it's the process of the struggle itself -- not necessarily its conclusion -- that's important.

Perhaps that's why Flying Low sounds so compelling. "We made this record upside down," he says. "We put the acoustic guitars and vocals on first and added the drums and bass last, so we had the rhythm section follow the guitars and vocals." The result is a supple sense of movement to the quiet turmoil; restlessness and resignation vying for position inside those vast, silent shadows. Now that's atmosphere.

JONATHAN PERRY(September 9, 1998)