Dry Wedding takes us on a journey into the darkest recesses of the Old West on the bleak The Back of Beyond.
Release date: July 31, 2026 | Vesperian / Metal Blade Records | Bandcamp | Instagram
For all the glitz, glamour, and heroics that Hollywood likes to foist upon it, the American Old West was a violent, horrible place. Death was an omnipresent threat, entire populations were demonized and destroyed, and whatever attempt at law there was usually felt as barbaric and draconian as the outlaws they were trying to stop. An awful place to be, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t adore bands that aimed to capture that exact spirit in music. My own favorite take so far has been the dusty metal of Wayfarer (Fields of the Nephilim is occult enough to land in their own domain), but damned if their Vesperian labelmates Dry Wedding aren’t making a hell of a good crack at that feeling too.
The announcement of the band’s third album, The Back of Beyond, came almost comically the day after I checked out 2021’s Sway and decided the Dry Wedding was onto something I wanted to track. Self-described as ‘Heavy Gothic Western Post-Punk from PDX‘ on their Bandcamp, that previous album was a deeply intriguing blend of angular, noisy guitar, malevolent twanginess, some dirty cowpunk attitude, and and almost metallic sense of sun-scorched, dust-choked atmosphere anchored around the dramatic croons and wails of frontman Davey Ferchow (who, I’ll note, is a hell of a nice guy). Yeah, Sway was a very cool album, and seeing The Back of Beyond announced immediately after was a great ‘hell yeah, let’s do this again‘ moment.
It took absolutely no time for the grim overture of “Arrowhead” to feel that dusty, stifling atmosphere kick right back in like a desert haboob sweeping across the plains the choke out the land. Building from sparse chords and soft croons to a dense, intense climax, it’s just an outstanding ratcheting of intensity to introduce the album, and kicking from that to the fiery charge and melty dissonant guitars of “The Serpent Box” gets this hoedown rolling in style. It’s also an effective signpost that the jagged landscape the listener’s about to explore won’t just be dull plains. There’s a lot of texture hear, with mountains, valleys, rivers, and deserts to cross.
A key part of Dry Wedding‘s sound that I found myself quickly loving across The Back of Beyond is how much the guitars exist to evoke an atmosphere. Sure, you’ll get some rollicking rhythms here and there, but much of Dry Wedding‘s tangible approach comes from the rolling drum work and clanging bass of Tom Fuller and Chadwick Ferguson (hey, shoutout to another bass player named Ferguson!), paired with Ferchow’s vocals. Ferchow and Jarrod Green’s guitars are therefore left to explore sheer mood-building, be it hollow twangs or a Morricone-esque Spaghetti Western grandeur.
Or, in the case of the bleak stomp of “Sure as a Gun”, they could throw a curveball and sound like a drought-stricken iteration of surf rock that had me thinking of how Negative Plane once adapted surf into black metal context. Not a one-to-one sonic comparison, but that feeling definitely stuck with me. Meanwhile, the spectral string work of the brief “Blood-Red Vengeance” floated through the air like the smoke of a prairie campfire that had recently spread to the still-warm, bullet-riddled corpse of the man who built it. Shifting from that to the much more earthy, classic twang of the rollicking “One Last Strand” proved one of my favorite stretches of The Back of Beyond, splitting the difference between incidental music from Red Dead Redemption II and a potential soundtrack for a Blood Meridian adaptation.
The closing one-two of “Moths” and “Shifting Wilderness” wraps The Back of Beyond up with some of Dry Wedding‘s most emotive vocals and best peaks and valleys. The former leans into almost post-rocky atmospherics driving towards grand crescendos, while the latter warps like a desert mirage until the band burst into force like the arrival of a thunderstorm across the song’s back half. All in the space of barely 40 minutes, Dry Wedding‘s third album makes for a hell of an auditory revisionist Western.
Of course some note needs to be made about that beautiful cover art from Adam Burke, perfectly setting the scene for the band’s dark, dirty vibe. Having layouts handled by John Haughm, of Agalloch fame, is also one hell of a cool bit of staffing. The production work is also genuinely pitch perfect, with the guitars sounding massive in the cactus-esque prickliness. The drum work is delightfully organic, and the bass has all the punch it needs to pull the album down the tracks. All told, The Back of Beyond is a perfectly presented album that makes the venomous bite of its songwriting all the more deadly.
Between scorching days reaching into triple digit temperatures and completing my last listen before this review under smoke-choked skies (gotta love being downwind of those Canadian wildfires, eh?), the world gave me a great atmosphere to immerse myself in Dry Wedding‘s work, and damn did I ever get immersed. The Back of Beyond is a bleak document of Western misery to rival bands like Wayfarer and Sons of Perdition, and hopefully the move up to Vesperian and Metal Blade means more adventurous listeners will be ready to saddle up and ride West with the band, to riches or damnation. They’ve found themselves a great niche without too much competition (for the life of me I can’t come up with a decent ‘this town ain’t big enough for the two of us’ joke here), and anyone who likes their Western sounds dirty, dark, and blood-drenched would do well to check out The Back of Beyond. Why wait for high noon when you can take the shot now?
Band Photo by Kevin Brown
