Call of the West

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Call of the West

Studio album by Wall of Voodoo
Released	1982
Recorded	1981-1982
Genre	New Wave
Length	40:48
Label	IRS Records
Producer(s)	Richard Mazda
All Music Guide link Robert Christgau (B) link Rolling Stone (not rated) link
Wall of Voodoo chronology
Dark Continent (1981)	Call of the West (1982)	Granma's House (1984)

Call of the West is a 1982 album by American New Wave band Wall of Voodoo. "Mexican Radio" was released as a single (as well as a video that received moderate airplay on MTV), and is the group's most well-known song.

Call of the West is a concept album exploring the trials and tribulations of life of the common man in the southwestern United States, particularly in the desert towns east of Los Angeles which stretch along the interstate highways into Nevada and Arizona. Most of the songs are downbeat mood pieces expounding upon the dashed hopes, withered aspirations, economic disenfranchisement, and existential malaise afflicting many of those who come to the southwest in search of wealth, fame and personal fulfillment.

The bleak, haunting atmosphere of the album evokes the romantic western frontier myth transfigured by the urban fatalism of L. A. crime fiction and Hollywood film noir as well as the mournful, elegiac spirit of classic and revisionist movie westerns. In many songs, the themes of self-deceiving ambition and bitter disillusionment set against the sunbaked frenzy and desolation of southern California owe a great deal to the allegorical grotesquerie of Nathanael West.

The first song, "Tomorrow", is a fast-paced number propelled by a jagged electronic rhythm track. The lyrics tell of the mounting anxiety the singer experiences when he thinks about all of his unfulfilled plans which keep piling up around him ("Life is moving faster/I can feel it every day"). Time and again he succumbs to procrastination and a deferral of action.

The next track, "Lost Weekend", takes its title from the 1945 Billy Wilder movie of the same name. However, this is not a song about an alcoholic on a bender; rather, it is a desperate tale of an impoverished couple chasing one get-rich-quick scheme after another in a neverending cycle of renewed futility. The story is told in the third person against a slow, percolating electronic beat overlaid with languorous, breeze-like synth washes. The sardonic, matter-of-fact lyrics and the sparse yet nuanced musical accompaniment create a vivid portrait of a couple driving down a barren desert highway with the wind in their hair after an unprofitable weekend of playing the casinos in Vegas.