The Americans – Stand True

The Americans’ profile is nevertheless quite lower-vital, but the band arrives with significant-end endorsements. Greil Marcus was swept up by 2017 debut I’ll Be Yours and was left hankering for more. T Bone Burnett and Jack White commandeered them for The American Epic Sessions, with Burnett singing their virtues as “genius 21st-century musicians that are reinventing American heritage music for this century. And it seems even greater this century.”

Belated 2nd album Stand Correct reveals the West Coastline threesome of Patrick Ferris (vocals/guitar), Jake Faulkner (bass) and Zac Sokolow (guitar) to be keenly attuned to the form of roots-up new music that created The us. You can listen to the heartland bleat of Springsteen or Bob Seger in their uncooked grooves, alongside with the rugged Southern churn of Jason Isbell or Drive-By Truckers. There is plenty of soul below far too, with Ferris obviously in thrall to ’70s Van Morrison on songs like “The Day I Let You Down” and “What I Would Do”, the latter flavoured with a unique twist of Memphis. His quivering voice is especially striking on the title track, a paean to commitment and being power, typically in the face of overpowering odds, that sets up the lyrical concept of the album.

It’s the kind of impassioned stuff that demands a massive canvas, the band reaching for the epic on the blustery “Give Way”, the brutish, scorned “Romeo” and “Sore Bones”, the heaviest thing on listed here. On “The Day I Allow You Down”, Ferris appears desolate – “If there is penance to be paid out/Which is just what I’ll do/I’ll get down on bended knee” – ahead of becoming hauled up into a good surging refrain. A folkish acoustic guitar picks out the silken rhythm of “Guest Of Honour”, a further track of decline that weighs heavy on his jilted coronary heart. “I really feel like nothing that you beloved,” he pines, “And everything you touched”. As psychological drama, it seems wholly persuasive. Considerably like Stand Accurate itself, in fact.