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William The Conqueror’s fourth album, ‘Excuse Me While I Vanish’, very nearly didn’t happen. Frontman Ruarri Joseph's meta-biographical exploration of grunge and rock laden childhood landscapes was originally intended as a triptych of albums and a coming-of-age novel. A less neatly ordered narrative would soon unfurl, however, beginning with 2020 recording sessions at LA’s Sound City studio for the band's would-be climactic final instalment, ‘Maverick Thinker’ – the sudden imposition of lockdown restrictions forced Joseph and his bandmates, bassist Naomi Holmes and drummer Harry Harding, to abandon ship and hurry back to the UK. The album would eventually be released the following spring, but the band remained grounded, and Joseph found himself cocooned at home in Cornwall, ruminating on an uncertain creative future, watching on as his wife Mandy, a valiant mental health social worker, engaged with the all-too-real dilemmas of the pandemic-riven here and now.

“My wife was insomniac for the first six months of lockdown, which made it impossible for me to moan or grieve the fact that everything I’d been working on for the last five years had come to a standstill. It was a much-needed perspective and made me realise what a selfish undertaking William had been – navel-gazing with my head in the clouds when what people needed was boots firmly on the ground, preferably on the feet of someone like Mandy.”

Joseph got a job as a support worker and made found footage videos for his band’s album release, but writing itself was “not just put on the back burner but thrown on the fire!” It was only as restrictions eased, and his wife was finally able to sleep, that he found himself willing and able to write again. The Covid-altered landscape had enforced some authorial re-evaluation however, and William was now repurposed as an acute narrative distancing device for songs predicated on ingenuous compassion and touching uxoriousness, inspired by what Joseph saw as the real-life angels of the world.

"Writing for William forces me to be very selfish with my time and headspace — I have to be alone and without interruption. There’s an irony in dedicating an album to the one you love the most but needing them well out of the way to do so. If William were a real person, he wouldn't deserve someone like Mandy. I think that's where a lot of the album came from."

The album in question is Excuse Me While I Vanish, an extended disquisition on various kinds of crying for help and the thin line between creativity and madness, brought to life with the same semi-spoken, swamp-blues-Seattle-scuzz signature of the preceding trilogy – 2017’s Proud Disturber of the Peace, 2019’s Bleeding on the Soundtrack, and the aforementioned Maverick Thinker, from 2021 – and underpinned by the Holmes-Harding rhythm section.

“Those guys are angels too.”

The album was recorded in a vintage-gear-stuffed studio converted from a Pembrokeshire chapel by owner/engineer Owain Fleetwood Jenkins, with the WTC trio augmented by Joseph’s daughter Tilly on backing vocals. Its ten tracks marry earworm tunes with insistent, imperious, soaring rock shapes, all etched with Joseph’s insouciant yet richly compelling vocals and punctuated by chorus hooks that pull off the ineffable trick of being simultaneously nuanced and near-anthemic. The album title is similarly double-edged, evoking a duality in the desire to be alone. “Mandy’s job requires her to talk to people who are contemplating taking their own life. She says the ones you have to worry about are the ones that say, ‘I’m OK now, you can leave me alone, I’ll be alright’. It struck me as a powerful idea – the dangers of solitude.”

Album opener ‘The Puppet and the Puppeteer’, the almost talking blues-style verses contrasting with a typically spiralling, heart-warming chorus, explores this internal dialogue theme, an idea bordering on schizophrenia – who controls whom?

On the ensuing ‘The Bruises’, a song with hints of Pearl Jam and even Roy Orbison in its stately melodic architecture, Joseph sets out his psychological stall more explicitly. “It’s about relationships and vowing to look forward instead of raking over things that ultimately don’t matter. At least in my eyes. For William it’s about something very different.”

Elsewhere, ‘Shots Fired from Heaven’ – like conspiratorial ‘90s Dylan getting it on with Soundgarden – examines sudden twists of fate (“it’s the only song I wrote before quitting.” Joseph reveals. “It poured out the day after we got back from Los Angeles... a kind of gut reaction to what was going on. Something had come to take control of everyone, but it seemed to come from this ethereal place, and no one knew what the hell was going on...”), while the soaring ‘Somebody Else’ takes wing on a joyfully vertiginous piano riff and finds Ruarri/William metaphorically punching the air with a mixture of triumph and relief (“She loves me still/Against all odds, against my will”).

Contrast arrives on the slow, soulful ‘L.W.Y.’, its succinct but unshakeable chorus oscillating poignantly between the phrases “I’m lost within you/I’m lost without you”. It’s a song with a lengthier gestation than most on the album. “It took me years to write,” Joseph reveals. “A thought experiment to do with love song cliches and how to avoid them. L.W.Y. was the eventual result. It finally worked when I realised it wasn’t about husband and wife but father and daughter.” Appropriately enough, it’s Tilly Joseph who provides the song’s harmonies.

Another engaging detour arrives in the shape of ‘Elsie Friend’, evincing Joseph’s late-developing regard for Paul McCartney’s songwriting in its delightfully Beatle-esque melody and the ‘Eleanor Rigby’-like parade of characters with which it is populated. “It’s about how little you might know someone for real, yet you construct who you think they are in your head.”

A sense of warm redemption emanates from album-closer ‘In Your Arms’ – a song that tips a hat to both Bill Callahan and The Band in its intimate yet hymnal progress. Its aching chorus attests to a sense of deliverance, albeit qualified by a wry note of existential doubt (“In your arms, babe/If just for now”), before everything ascends to a screeching, angular climax riff – expression carried beyond words.

By this point, the album’s winning blend of melody and ensemble dynamics has taken hold, while Joseph’s ability to speak his truth through layers of poetic imagination and projected character serves to reinforce rather than blunt the efficacy of the songs.

While the virtues of mystique and restraint may not be trending this week, they are crucial to the very particular colour and appeal of Excuse Me While I Vanish, which stands as the most accomplished and undeniable William The Conqueror album to date. With the band fully reactivated and the repurposed William character now acting as a constructive catalyst rather than a kind of cathartic compulsion, could a once unthinkable fifth WTC long-player now be a realistic prospect?

“For now, I think we’re all just grateful to be here, concentrating on this album,” Joseph muses. “But never say never. If ideas start arriving, there’s simply nothing you can do about it...”