Joe Harvey-Whyte & Bobby Lee

A record that just immediately feels right. Joe Harvey-Whyte (The Hanging Stars) and Bobby Lee have been holding down the corners of the Cosmic American outpost in the UK for sometime now. The pair have often been found touring together and it was bound to end in the studio, but who could have predicted just how vital a record would result from that meeting of minds? The pair’s first full length expands on the hypnotic choogle that anchors Bobby’s solo records, bridging highland mountains with a distant Western Sun. The record exists in some intangible haze; a bakelight bridge to the past that reverberates in the V-hold flicker of home videos from forgotten desert expanses. The album hovers in hallucinations of the desert — dehydration delusions fighting for space with heat and peyote among the brain’s short circuits and hot wire wonders to soundtrack a lysergic landscape.

Last Ride feels like a cinematic score searching for a way into our reality. Hit mute on any number of parched desert classics and this should serve as a stand-in behind those scenes that seem to be sweating out of the screen. Lace “Plainsong” over Paris, Texas, dub “The Babalon Working” over Rubin & Ed, or slip “Deep Time” into The Hired Hand and all might feel like missing puzzle pieces. Arcing from drum-machine-dinged country coolers to pastoral fingerwork and the kosmiche thrum of drone, Last Ride is a distillation of the surreal beauty of the Western sprawl. The pair are both no rookies to the wrangle of the cosmic shades of Americana and country, and here they offer up an album that’s doused in a quivering lightness, a heat-ripple conduit from the plateaus to pulsars. Having explored the Slabtown side streets with Bobby in the past, you may be ready for the ride already, but with their combined forces, the record wanders towards transcendent.

Support the artist. Buy it HERE.