Efforts on trial-inspired album pay off

Someone’s Got to Pay The Wilders Free Dirt Records Rocks like: Johnny Cash, Hank Williams (Sr. and Jr.)

out of

Fiddles, electric guitar, country vocals, a phantom drummer and a murder trial: How much wilder can things get?

The Wilders’ Someone’s Got to Pay showcases the four members’ numerous musical talents, most prominently their fiddle skills and their ability to create a beat without a drummer.

The band, which consists of Ike Sheldon (lead vocals, piano, guitar), Betse Ellis (fiddle), Nate Cawron (bass) and Phil Wade (fiddle, dobro), plays a mix of rock ‘n’ roll, classic country and blues songs. Confining it to a single genre doesn’t do the band’s unique sound justice.

Speaking of justice, the legal system receives a significant amount of attention on this album. Wade wrote a series of songs after he served as a juror in a first-degree murder trial in Kansas City, Mo., where a man was tried for shooting his wife in a parking lot after their divorce.

The trial clearly disturbed Wade, and the five-song series tells the dark story. There are very little words to the five songs, but this somehow makes their imagery more vivid.

Sheldon and Wade composed a piano solo as an introduction to each of the parts of “Sittin’ on a Jury,” and Sheldon beautifully performs them.

These brief intros serve as a buffer from the rest of the album into the more serious tale of the trial.

The first song about the trial is “The Prologue,” which begins with a dark, suspenseful piano combined with a Western banjo. If justice had a sound, this would be it.

“The Prosecution” is much more upbeat, with electric guitar and hands clapping to an angry beat.

“The old prosecutor, he got the first turn / Told us how Davey planned his crime