While listening to Patrick Watson‘s newest album, Adventures In Your Own Backyard, I thought something sounded familiar. Snippets of songs were reminding me of the music from a Spaghetti Western movie – the sub-genre of 1960s Italian-produced western films with their own distinctive musical style. Lo and behold, reading Watson’s statement on the album on his website, he lists Ennio Morricone, king of the Spaghetti Western score as an influence for the album.
But if that makes you think this album will make you want to saddle up your horse and dig up some gold, you’re wrong. Watson’s tributes to Morricone are subtle. Here and there a touch of horn section brings the impression of what we’ve come to expect from a movie set in the old west, added as a seamless bonus to Watson’s dreamy style. Take, for example, the trumpet solo about two thirds of the way into “Lighthouse.” Or the title track, which features more of that same horn sound, with an added backbeat that also echos the genre. Or “The Things You Do,” an instrumental track with a spooky and melancholy feel sounds like it should be part of a movie score, any movie with the right mood, really.
What Watson and his Montreal-based band manage to do, like the best movie soundtracks, is capture a sense of mood and space through sound. Sure, there’s no screen to watch here, but the instrumental parts of the songs, combined with Watson’s lyrics paint distinct scenes that anyone half-listening would be hard pressed not to imagine.
