Largely unacknowledged, Warm Springs Night was one of the finest and most original records of its decade. The disc itself is black, displaying only the identifying legend ELRO 3. The songs form an intermittent narrative, possibly of disparate scenes over years in the chaotic life of just one woman. This record simply denies the existence of daytime as if it's a scientific impossibility. At the heart of it all is the title song, the key being the fact that Warm Springs is the site of a Wyoming sanitarium.
Night is magical because it conceals so much, with possibility swelling in the dark corners.
All the rest of that winter I lay on the floor of the house my death-money had bought, my own last living relative, goosed to the gills on beer and Percocet and listening to this record again and again, floating in that dark heaven where everything seemed alive. In its unflinching bleakness, the band sounds like a country-western Joy Division, say, fronted by the great poet of suicide and insanity Weldon Kees. Not much else in the history of rock cuts this deep and dark. The lee side to Warm Springs Night offers one rich piece after another but the mission is already complete. In Phelps' night there is a refuge, but no denial, from the Voyagers, Pathfinders, and Cherokees crowding and despoiling the holy West, the impermanence of love and the aloneness that is the last thought and that will swallow it all.