For this CD, the leader of the popular Madison area roots-rock band The Midwesterners left “Wiegel Room” for his lonely guitar and just a bit extra. The less-is-more strategy plays like a royal flush and one tune, “Richard’s Rondo,” just won the Madison Area Music Award for best classical composition. He chose a classical form for “Rondo,” an utterly fetching sequence of expositions and recapitulations, enriched by bluesy harmonies.
This delicious CD is largely folk-blues based, as per 1960s virtuosos John Fahey and Leo Kottke and their country-blues/R&R precursors. The opening “Buddy Holly” radiates all the genial charm of Buddy’s bespectacled smile and exuberant romanticism. By contrast, the mordantly vocal slide picking of “Wednesday Blues” sounds like a working stiff mumbling to himself, which the weight of “hump day” can induce. “Lazy A” is behind-the-beat picking with a third chorus of pinging chords hovering around the shuffling A key like a taunting hummingbird. Throughout, Wiegel’s gifts for the droll aside and the lyrical sigh shine.
Wiegel periodically enhances himself with adroit but never-overdone overdubs. And the wisely ironic closer, “Slippery Slope,” uses relatively new-tech Fender electric distortion, a la Bill Frisell. Wiegel suggests a human character—in a primping, inflated theme—a blustery politician who may not know he’s slipping? Ah, hubris, old devil moon, you got me flyin’ high and low.
