Album Review: Henry Wagons - Expecting Company?

Blink and you'll miss it. And that would be a damn shame. Melbourne's favourite bespectacled baritone bloke, Henry Wagons, has stepped away from his group, Wagons, to deliver a seven-track, sub-half hour mini-album of duets. Country tales of woe, lust and longing, Expecting Company is a postcard sent by one of Australia's hardest-working and humble musicians.

The London-inspired title track, featuring Alison Mosshart of The Kills, sounds like it could come straight from the title sequence of a Tarantino film, Mosshart and Wagons' voices circling and rising to an epic climax. Sophia Brous steps up to the plate with a wild ride through a blackened countryside on I'm In Love With Mary Magdalene (“How I've longed for your flesh to touch my skin”), and with the help of Canadian Jenn Grant on Give Things A Chance To Mend, Wagons delivers the record's highlight, a Johnny- and June-worthy country ballad that could've been recorded while looking wistfully across a frozen Albertan prairie.

Taking a swift sojourn from the guy-and-girl duets, Wagons teams up with the Go-Betweens' Robert Foster for I Still Can't Find Her, a story of some very twisted and tragic love connections. From there, the dark, decrepit A Hangman's Work Is Never Done features The Grates' Patience Hodgson and a psychedelic – and psychotic – delivery alongside some brutally-laid guitar licks. The final duet, Give Me A Kiss, features Gossling and is a beautiful way to finish the album, before Wagons bids a final farewell on his own with an acoustic version of Marylou Two, from his band's most recent album.

Expecting Company is an unexpected treat. Full of amazing collaborations, it proves that Henry Wagons still loves to keep us guessing.