Fire

James Jackson Toth has a given name that sounds like a cross between a Civil War general and a Norse god. It’s hard to understand why he needs any other. But he also records under the name Wooden Wand, and sometimes just Wand. The songs on the newest Wooden Wand release are stocked with Biblical portent, guns, Wal-Marts, blood, gasoline, gloom, suckerfish and strange grace. Wooden Wand occupies that dark place where pill-popping hippies, boozy rednecks and rampant sociopaths converge. There are shards of prophecy on the glacial 12-minute
ghost-waltz opener, with lines about “diluvial wreckage” and “psychic foreclosure.” For six or seven years now, at least, Toth has been writing the kind of brooding tunes that Leonard Cohen would have written had he been raised in a Southern Pentecostal church before backsliding into the role of troubadour.