There are so many bands making the sort of laid-back, Gram Parsons, warm breeze, West Coast music these days that you almost can’t escape it. There’s only one, though, that has relations of notorious Train Robber “Black Jack” Ketchum involved.
Tylor And The Train Robbers have been on our radar since the 2019 “Best Of The Worst Kind” album, and this one is cut from the same troubadour cloth.
Tylor Ketchum has a voice that was born to live on the dirt roads: “A good piece of wood and a pocket knife will whittle away a day” he sings on the title track here, over some brilliant lap steel, and essentially all is well with the world.
And things veer into front porch country, for “Next Long Haul”, while “The Skittle Man” gets itself in the honky tonk and is happy there, and “Workin’ Hands” understands its blue-collar credentials as well as anything does.
“The Sailing Song” is not a sea shanty, which is a shame, “Straight As An Arrow” slows the pace and there’s a touch of contentment about it, indeed the whole record is very accepting of its lot in life it seems to me.
The rock n roll gets happily dialled up on “I Ain’t The Only One” while the Townes Van Zandt style folk of “Ton Of Nails” provides a neat contrast.
As it does, it rather neatly ties up the loose ends. Tylor And The Train Robbers might be loosely linked to American History, but on “Hum Of The Road” they’ve shown yet again that they are bound up tightly in the pages of the Great American Songbook.
Rating 8.5/10
