American Catastrophe

Excerpts From The Broken Bone Chair

(Oxblood)

Record Review by Marcel Feldmar

I can’t help it – the look of a record always plays into the way I listen to it. The band logo, the cover art, the design, the album title – I’m not always right when I think these things, and sometimes I’m surprised, sometimes even pleasantly. I’ve heard many good songs by bands that don’t know how to put together a good looking album, but in the case of American Catastrophe, I’m hoping in sounds I get something at least close to what I see… The design, the style, the title… it’s all screaming out Sixteen Horsepower meets Sackville… and I like where that might go.

Excerpts hits immediately with a dark lounge southern swamp swing and Nick Cave vocals. I’m happy so far… Definitely hints of the Sixteen Horsepower / Woven Hand bands floating through here, alongside some Bad Seed beauty, but with a little more jazz flowing along the edges. Dark lyrics and dark moods dig and chug through the melodics, which pull at the same strings that you find Mick Harvey pulling, and the vocals, as they move out of the Cave, they move against a deeper Mark Lanegan memory, and I’m looking for the whiskey, watching for crows. There are some breaks in the depths, as the band moves out of gothic slo-core into dirty rock grittiness. Moving from Low to Tom Waits, moving from Molasses to early Sonic Youth. Epic and enchanting anthems that push you so deep you drown in the rhythmic energy. Journeys of the soul never sounded as good as they do here. Barry Adamson doing Johnny Cash. Pulling out songs that could fit easily on Nick Cave’s “The Firstborn Is Dead” and then attaching to them a hard almost Tool-like aggressiveness, the vocals pushing like Maynard James Keenan’s against a backdrop of eerily ghost town destruction sounding guitar work and toms that roll like the first Sonic Youth album before hanging the head down low back into Cave’s territory. From a deep Tindersticks melody to a harsh lost highway to a train bound for parts unknown, American Catastrophe just don’t let go for a second, carrying you along with them through every dirt road and haunted willow tree that hangs lost by every dark roadside in America.