"Wells and co-producer Chris Arduser were reportedly surprised at the failure of this album to garner more attention. This is no surprise; in psychological parlance, people are “cognitive misers,” and if they cannot easily categorize a record on a first or second listen, they frequently lose the patience to continue applying the effort necessary to understand it. This is the rule followed by major label marketing departments, of course, to the eternal detriment of art.

Rhyolite defies pigeon holes. It is electric-alt-western-rock-punk-mariachi, or something like that, with extremely professional production. Straight rock’n’roll beats and distorted guitar blend with Southwestern single-note-hollow-body electric guitar sounds, trumpets from south of the border, and Wells’s reasonably convincing outlaw baritone (a whiff, but only a whiff, of Johnny Cash) to produce a mix of styles that we’ve not heard before, but which does work, if you invest some time in it. The record sounds fully professional, as would be expected given Arduser’s involvement.

It’s a very smartly made record, and probably came out exactly as its conceivers intended. It is, it can be said, a good record. But it’s not right for our top 20. Although Wells must be weary of hearing this refrain, in this case the record misses for reasons other than merely its defying categorization.

Wells’s ironic lyrics wink at you through a veritable laundry list of old-West clichés — high-noon duels, horses and wagons, coffee and eggs, cowboy calls of “yip yip yip.” Thus does the singer keep his subject matter firmly at an emotional arm’s length. After several listens, I still remain unconvinced that I can detect Wells giving the first damn about the stories he’s telling. I can’t be sure whether or not he’s making fun of his subjects and the cowboy-music genre. Of course, by intellectual punk aesthetics, this is the very definition of getting it right. But we are looking to fall in love with records, not merely to chuckle as we acknowledge wry intelligence in them.

The melodies are fine and sometimes hook you, but can sound like an afterthought. It’s clear the emphasis in Wells’s writing was not here. Despite the above-mentioned ironic remove, and aside from the strong stylistic statement of the record, we think it’s probably the lyric and the stories Wells intended to place front-and-center. And in this matter, we think it was a mistake to undermix the vocal. In this respect, Rhyolite abandons its western folk footing in favor of that of modern punk rock, in which loud vocals are viewed with suspicion. Although Wells’s vocal is not so soft as to make it clear whether this choice was conscious or unconscious, we think at least unconsciously, the producers may have invoked this punk tradition during mixdown. Where audible, Wells’s vocals are colorful. But in most of the songs, there are entire passages rendered wholly indecipherable by sheer low volume. Where the lyrics are of primary importance, we would argue low vocals can wreak considerable damage on an album’s impact, and may have played a stealthy yet enormous role in this record’s failure to garner more attention.

If we take Johnny Cash as the standard-bearer for slightly-ironic-yet-honest outlaw folk, a comparison of this with a record from Cash’s best years may be appropriate. Are Cash’s vocals buried in the mix? Almost never. Indeed, by today’s standards, vocals on country, folk and rock records from the 1960s tended overmix their lead vocals to the point of absurdity. I can imagine sitting at the controls and trying to persuade a modern-day singer to allow me to mix his vocal as loud as on, say, a Roy Orbison record. I would get nowhere!

If Wells wants to pursue this 3-year-old project further, a left-field recommendation, then, might be that he re-mix it, with the vocal overmixed to the point of what will sound to him like ridiculousness. As a reference, consider Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind from 1997, produced by Daniel Lanois. The vocal is, on this album, at times so loud as to be mixed manifestly incorrectly. It takes guts to do this, but almost nobody outside the musicians sitting around a mixing console ever complains that the vocal is too easy to make out. People who love music of the punk aesthetic and embrace experimentation at the same time should not object to this one change. Anyhow, they should check out this record, because, notwithstanding our gripes, it’s good, the attitude is just right, and it ought to have received more attention than it did. (Did this record not achieve more notoriety at college radio, at least?)

Alternately, Wells could take his promising stylistic beginnings as a foundation and evolve just a smidge. For our preferences, we’d like to hear more authentic connection with the subject matter, a little more seriousness, and a really loud vocal. Wells clearly has something important to say, and it might be prudent to view Rhyolite as a preliminary experiment, the step he needed to take to ready himself to create his masterpiece." -Everett Young, I-Pop