“Are you ready for a new scene?” sings Eugene Rice on the opening line of “Get On and Fly”, the lead track from American Dream.
With no offence meant, what makes this brilliant isn’t that it’s “new” — rather, it’s the purest rock ‘n’ roll you can imagine.
Pick a band from The Black Crowes to The Commoners and they’d love to have it. But, y’see, American Mile are only just getting started.
“Photograph of You” could — if you closed your eyes — be a Mike Cooley number for the Drive-By Truckers: drenched in slide guitar and steeped in Americana.
The acoustic, singer-songwriter style of “Waiting on a Sunday” is as soft as it is gentle, but there’s a dream here. A hankering for something, anything, better. That hope seems to soar with Joe Perez’s guitar solo.
The title track is as blue collar as you can get. Would you want it any other way than “punching that clock 9–5, scraping by barely alive”? Hell no.
But here’s the thing: like it says, “you don’t have to be from the USA if you want to dream it today.” And that’s why it resonates with someone in the English Midlands. The sound offers the same window to the same world that rock ‘n’ roll has always promised — something intangible, but indelibly real.
The sassy and funky “Wiggle for Me” will fill dancefloors, while “Tough Living” is the product of life on the road — struggling, sure, but there’s nowhere else they’d rather be.
Working again with Grammy-nominated Keith Nelson and Bruce Witkin, as they did on their debut, ensures continuity (and if Nelson is the former Buckcherry guitarist, he gets MV bonus points for working with Ricky Warwick too).
But the real class is in the songwriting. “Straight from the Heartland” includes the line “straight from the heart is who I am”, which seems to underscore the whole damn thing. They mean every word — especially, you’d guess, on the soul-fuelled “Hard Working People”.
It ends on its most country-tinged moment, “Junkie’s Dream”, which veers into a lyrical path you wouldn’t expect, its spoken-word ending acting as a kind of warning to all involved.
The clues are in the band name and album title: American. And while it’s undoubtedly a walk through US culture — picking bits and pieces from the hedgerows as it goes — it writes its own page in the songbook too.
Only nine songs, but there’s a focus on quality rather than quantity. Nothing here approaches filler. American Dream is probably exactly how they dreamt it would turn out.
Rating: 8.5/10
