Most Popular

"Most Popular" tools sponsored by:

Recent Articles

Recent Articles by Lee Zimmerman

National Features >

  • Broward-Palm Beach New Times

    Sexual Healing

    For Florida's sole remaining sex surrogate, love is a many splintered thing.

    By Michael J. Mooney

  • City Pages

    Your Friendly Neighborhood War Profiteer

    It's not just giant companies cashing in on America's defense industry.

    By Jeff Severns Guntzel

  • The Pitch

    Supersizing Sonic

    How a throwaway idea at the Barkley ad agency became the "Sonic Guys."

    By Justin Kendall

  • Houston Press

    Temples of Tex-Mex

    A diner's guide to Texas's oldest Mexican restaurants.

    By Robb Walsh

Willard Grant Conspiracy

Regard the End (Kimchee)

By Lee Zimmerman

Published on February 19, 2004

Willard Grant Conspiracy isn't so much a band as a concept, a swirling torrent of sounds and observations from the mind of its sole mainstay, singer and songwriter Robert Fisher. Having relocated from Boston to the fringes of the Mojave Desert, Fisher drew on the mysticism that surrounds this retreat from California's suburban sprawl to sketch a series of mournful folk-Gothic ruminations, or what he describes as "a meditation on mortality." Sad, somber, sobering, it's more Sunday morning than Saturday night, brooding and yet compelling in some inexplicable way.

Regard the End unfolds as a cerebral sojourn of lo-fi proportions. An eleven-song album that weaves traditional numbers with Fisher originals, its haunting melancholia brings to mind Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen, and Johnny Cash's final song cycle in its depictions of desolation and despair. Though it's hardly the kind of thing you'd play when the gang's over for cocktails, the iridescent glow that illuminates "Beyond the Shore," "Soft Hand," and "Fare Thee Well" does bode well for a more metaphysical encounter.



Miami New Times Insiders

  • Local food, music and news blasts
  • Free Stuff