The first musical outing to be issued under his birth name (he has been releasing novels as Wesley Stace since 2005), the artist formerly known as John Wesley Harding's eleventh long-player certainly sounds familiar, especially to anyone who has followed his trajectory from fiery yet disarmingly charismatic British troubadour in the vein of Robyn Hitchcock, Nick Lowe, and Billy Bragg to well-respected, Connecticut-based literary figure.
Wesley Stace - Self-Titled (2013) MP3/FLAC
Folk, Indie | Yep Roc Records
Lossless | FLAC | unmixed | 2013 | 54:30 | 123 / 306 Mb
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Tracklist:
1) The Dealer's Daughter
2) When I Knew
3) Goodbye Jane
4) Letting Go
5) We Will Always Have New York
6) A Canterbury Kiss
7) Lydia
8) Stare At the Sun
9) Only Thing Missing
10) Ride Your Camel
11) Wrong for the Part
12) Pieces of the Past
13) Excalibur
14) The Wrong Tree
15) The Bedroom You Grew Up in
16) The Woman

Stace has always had a gift for conjuring up colorful characters, but it would seem that his newfound success as a fiction writer has absorbed a great many of his alter egos, leaving behind what is essentially his first collection of songs to focus solely on the trials and tribulations of their creator. At 16 tracks, the aptly named and deeply personal Wesley Stace feels a little bit like a coming out party that turned into a notebook emptying free-for-all. However, his gift for erudite gab is certainly on display here, as there are some winning songs like "The Dealer's Daughter" and "Excalibur" to add to the Stace/Harding canon, and when those words are paired with a melody as lovely as the one that propels the gorgeous "Stare at the Sun," one of two tracks, along with the less musically affecting "When I Knew," that were co-written with ex-Fiery Furnaces' vocalist Eleanor Friedberger, the results can be transcendent, but Stace's evocative prose too often becomes mired in midtempo drudgery and recycled chord changes, both of which would be less apparent had he chosen brevity over prolificacy.