Black Hen Music
2009
Western Bell
About This Album
Guitarist and songwriter Kelly Joe Phelps has always traveled an iconoclastic, enigmatic path. Since the release of his debut album, Lead Me On in 1995 on the tiny Burnside imprint, through his amazing Rykodisc recordings from the late part of that decade and the middle of the first part of this century, he's wound his way through covers and his own songs with a particular sense of place and rough-hewn elegance. Western Bell is Phelps' first record since 2006, issued on the Vancouver indie Black Hen Music.

Norman & Nancy Blake once released an album with their Rising Fawn String Ensemble called Original Underground Music from the Mysterious South, comprised of folk songs, Civil War era reels, and dance tunes that felt utterly out of time and space because they were so basic and unadorned, so completely uncluttered by anything but a direct attempt to play this music as the seemingly forgotten and alien construct it was in the early 1980s. Phelps' album, it can be paraphrased, is "original underground music from the mysterious (North)west." Just as Loren MazzaCane Connors mutated his love of the Delta blues into an avant-guarde hybrid all his own -- often barely recognizable as blues but clearly based in it -- Phelps has, on Western Bell, offered listeners a complete synthesis of his musical vision as a guitarist.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 and 8)

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