I was roughly halfway through “Changed” -- the brooding first track on Brian Webb’s new album, Strange Way to Grieve -- when I knew he’d made the record of his life. The record I’d been waiting more than a decade for him to make. It was so lush and atmospheric, so patient and deep, so... thick. 

That was the word I kept coming back to. Thick. Like the fullness of a great novel, or the way a widescreen film envelops you in its wings and folds you into itself.

Thick.

To listen to Strange Way to Grieve is to hear an artist stepping at last into the fullness of his immense potential. For more than fifteen years Brian Webb has been slowly growing into himself, a master lyricist from the earliest age, yet one whose musical ambitions have had to scrape and scramble to keep up with the power of his poetry. But the music, like its maker, has evolved. And its evolution is apparent on every track.

From the elegiac march of the aforementioned opener, “Changed,” to the banjo-fueled mania of the standout rocker, “The Awful Grace of God,” through the achingly confessional title track, and on to the soaring chorus of the heartbreaking finale, “While It Rained,” this is a record that demands a careful inspection and rewards the faithful listener.

Though he is prone to near-constant self-deprecation and jokes about the ubiquity of his brand of “privileged white boy folk,” Brian Webb is in truth a songwriter of the highest order, and on Strange Way to Grieve the majesty of the music has grown at last to meet the mastery of the lyrics. The end result is his first truly spectacular record, an uncompromising masterpiece that sinks its talons into your soul and refuses to ever let go. 

It is, in short, the record I’ve always been waiting for.

Scott Teems
Writer/Director 
Pasadena, CA
March 2011

Sample Tracks

Changed

Bird On A Wire (L. Cohen)

Awful Grace of God

California Part 2

While It Rained