Something in this feels like an absolute resignation.
Son Volt’s prevailing style for their last five records is a yearning, down-tempo version of alternative country. American Central Dust, however, seems like a half-turn further toward a maudlin country rock.
The plight of working people is alive and well. It’s seemingly on the evening news every night of 2009, and it’s on the tip of Son Volt leader Jay Farrar’s tongue. The oft-brilliant songwriter tells a good tale, his plaintive voice that of the angst ridden and the otherwise voiceless. On American Central Dust, that ability remains a prominent aspect. Songs like “Cocaine and Ashes” and “Dust Of Daylight” are notably outstanding but strangely reside among the few. Okemah and the Melody of Riot opened with the smashing “Bandages & Scars,” a truly defining song, while this album seems to drag itself upright and to life. That sense of being only half present exists throughout the album’s twelve tracks—nothing particularly wrong, but leaving the listener with the feeling that whatever in the Son Volt chemistry that makes them riotous was stretched thin in the songwriting.
The band’s legacy isn’t as the ashes from Uncle Tupelo. Nor are they fairly seen as the leftovers from the more critically adored Wilco. Their records (beginning with 1995’s Trace and up through 2005’s Okemah) have set a precedent for the darker, grittier tales that spring from the middle-American underbelly. The element missing on American Central Dust that has marked almost all of Jay Farrar’s output might be a sense of determination. Without that, the songs feel like alt-country melodrama. The situations described, however desperate, don’t add up to the expectation of being heart-wrenching.
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