Something totally weird has happened. Something I spent a lot of my life actively working against while being reared in smalltown Texas has suddenly started to make sense: I’m sort of digging country. I was shellacked with ungodly guilt and smirks upon the realization and revelation of this fact. You can only yell “Asshole” to a certain number of Confederate-draped trucks before they’re allowed to brandish the bullhorn mounted in those Hella lights and scream “Hypocrite!” right on back, you know? If those dudes could see me now (they can’t), they’d have an offcial license to mock. I mean, my dad gave me a Jerry Jeff Walker LP when I told him about this and, uh, I liked it. It’s a pretty serious affliction and, in addition, it’s entirely the fault of this album, Around the Horn, by Souled American.
Souled American are one of those heavily under-listened-to bands. According to Rough Trade, they have that rare distinction of each subsequent release selling fewer records than the previous. I really don’t remember how I heard of them past the skeletal and languid reputations of their last two albums. After the “best band ever” confirmation by a friend, I searched out their not terribly easy to find records. Around the Horn marks the mid-career stage for the band and superlatively bridges early- and late-period Souled American. Thus it is pretty slow in the grand scheme of things, even if it’s damn upbeat in regards to future Souled endeavors.
The big tonal distinction is Joe Adducci’s bass, which sounds more or less like it was recorded underwater from three rooms away, though here it isn’t quite as extreme as on earlier albums. Adducci and Chris Grigoroff share vocal duties, both singing in a weird, raspy, twangy voice that occasionally lapses into falsetto. The guitars on this record are, for lack of a better analogy, the shoegaze of country; churning, ringing, and slippery. It seems like the guitars are strummed a few seconds before you actually hear the sound. The whole album has random dissonances bristling about. The final two albums saw the band play without drummer Jamey Barnard, but here, on their third, his presence is already pretty minimal, the drums almost always understated.
Around the Horn also introduced me to the country notion of releasing an album half filled with cover songs and not being seen as a total hack-job (in fact, their next album, Sonny, has only one original on it). They inhabit the covers so well that I really can’t imagine any of these songs being written by anyone but Souled American. They’re that sort of inexplicably weird band where you can’t quite put your finger on what’s so bizarre about them, which is, at the end of the day, what makes Souled American worth listening to in the first place.