This is not your mom’s Masked Singer. Unless your mom is way cooler than I think she is. For those who haven’t been paying attention, newcomer Orville Peck has not spent the last few months belting out pop and rock classics for a panel of Hollywood halfwits every week on the boob tube. Instead, the leather-covered cowboy crooner — who seems to takes his sartorial cues from the likes of Zorro and Orion, as opposed to animals and aliens — has been slowly but surely intriguing music fans with a series of fittingly enigmatic and cinematic videos in service of his debut disc Pony. Now that it’s finally arrived, we can take the full measure of the man, the myth and the musician who makes his home on the strange end of the range. As for the former, well, supposedly Orville’s true and secret identity is that of Canadian Daniel Pitout, the drummer of Vancouver punks Nu Sensae and singer of Eating Out. His musical persona, of course, is what really counts — and in that regard, the surreal gothic cowboy balladeer stays golden by expertly walking the line between classic and cutting-edge. Pony‘s dozen darkly burnished gems smartly and stylishly mix sounds and styles, setting lazily twangy guitars, high-lonesome whistling and Peck’s impressively pseudo-operatic pipes against haunted textures, droning tones and unsettling atmospherics. If you can imagine an alternate-universe Nashville where Roy Orbison, Elvis Presley and Long Ryders joined forces with Scott Walker to record the soundtrack for a David Lynch movie, you’re ready to ride with Peck’s posse. No special headgear required.
