Introspective, but brimming with a raw-boned optimism, Son Volt’s American Central Dust found a focused Jay Farrar asking questions – and being OK when he didn’t always get answers.
That confidence of purpose, despite the unease of a fast-moving, recession-torn dynamic, seemed to come from getting back to a stripped-down musical approach. Of course, that once defined Son Volt and, before that, Farrar’s groundbreaking former alt-country band Uncle Tupelo. But there had been quite a journey since Son Volt’s debut album Trace, and they’d last been heard delving into interesting, though somehow unfulfilling musical experiments on 2007’s The Search.
American Central Dust, which arrived on July 7, 2009, traded all of that in for a more intimate rusticism, and a more troubled landscape: Instantly recognizable characters tried to make do with the table scraps of a lost American dream, amid fiddles, pedal and lap steels and piano. It was like seeing a Depression-era black-and-white photo come to life in the digital age.
Jay Farrar, Son Volt’s singer and songwriter, eased into the middle of his epic lament for the heartland and its values like a dandy lion finding a way through cracks on the state highway. His insouciant singing style often has a kind of lazy brilliance, and that added its own off-handed depth.
American Central Dust celebrated the simple things, even while it wondered about romance: “This love,” Farrar crooned on the opener, “is like celebrating the 4th of July with dynamite.” “Roll On,” a dream-like lament, made the case for fighting through life’s insistent ennui. Farrar also looked around and saw the history: He recalled a sunken ship outside of Memphis which took 1,800 to a watery grave after a boiler blew, singing “the Titanic of the Mississippi was the Sultana.”
Then there was Son Volt’s unpretentious country ballad “Cocaine and Ashes,” said to be a tribute to the ageless rock ‘n’ roll warrior Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. Here, Farrar appealed to our better angels, even if we sometimes ignore their quiet warnings. After all, as the song’s subject admits, survivors are “the same as everyone, just kind of lucky.”
Happily, these touches of Americana never dragged Son Volt back into a somnolent doze. The boozy, tremolo-drenched “Down to the Wire” echoed out with an insistent backbeat like the law’s red wail. “Pushed Too Far” connected a pair of soul-lifting musical moments, played out hundreds of miles apart – a night of blues picking by Snooks Eaglin at the Rock ‘n’ Bowl in New Orleans (“pure gasoline for the soul“) and the duck-walking brilliance of Chuck Berry, heard up-river in St. Louis. “Jukebox of Steel,” the galloping closer, embraced our nomadic prairie-pioneer desire to keep moving.
Those travels, of course, will often take us to unexpected insight. “No Turning Back,” which sounds like something from the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo, started out wondering what the post-industrial revolution’s lasting effects will be on a hard-working nation – but then left turned into a rumination on how manifest destiny impacted the planet beneath our feet in the first place. Son Volt’s rousing “No Turning Back” then drove us out into the sticks. Once there, though, the wide skies, empty side roads and lonely passing freight trains suddenly brought Jay Farrar back to a lost love.
There were pleasing rushes of feeling as Farrar topped these hills, discovering new things in familiar places. Son Volt’s “Strength and Doubt” tied all of those emotions together: Farrar admits we can be surrounded by grays and blues in this world, while arguing that we’re still bolstered by community. Together, we share “tales of strength and doubt, how to live without,” and we go on.
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