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Artist
Will Johnson
12+ albums
singer-songwriterfolkAlt-countryindieindie rock
about
Will Johnson is the frontman of both the Alt-Country bands Centro-Matic and South San Gabriel. He played drums in the band Funland prior to these groups and has played solo throughout his career. He recently released an album with Magnolia Electric Co. frontman Jason Molina under the name Molina & Johnson. He is also the performing drummer for the band Monsters of Folk.Will Johnson’s latest solo album, Swan City Vampires, is distinguished by its immediacy and intimacy. Crisp, measured acoustic guitars cushion the Austin-based singer-songwriter’s equally precise, conspiratorial vocals, while keening pedal steel, droning electric guitars, and the occasional askew keyboard add color. The results fall somewhere in the cracks between Neil Young and Crazy Horse noise hurricanes, road-worn folk songs, and low-key alt-country barnstorming. More tellingly, Swan City Vampires begins with a bracing, two-minute instrumental track, “Paradise, Basically.” Jagged electric guitar chords ripped apart by distortion and static dominate the song, aggression that’s tempered by an unsettled, minor-key piano melody hovering just underneath the surface. It’s not necessarily the easiest entry into an album, but make no mistake: This tone and sound—which Johnson describes as “pretty ugly”—is entirely deliberate. “The album is a little reckless out of the gate, with the first song, and I wanted that to be the case,” he says. “I wanted there to be some discomfort, some uncertainty and some oddity.”
