Twenty albums in and yet another hugely impressive release from American Aquarium.
A look back through the Americana UK archives will find plenty of references to American Aquarium, including a very rare 10 out of 10 review for their 2020 album Lamentations. Independent in all aspects of their music, the band could almost be poster boys for what this website is all about. Without a major label or mainstream radio support the band are proud of answering to nobody. American Aquarium own their publishing, launched their own festival and the latest release New Ways To Lose is again released independently through CJ Barham’s own Losing Side Records.
Barham founded the band in 2006 and, twenty years and twenty albums later, is still writing songs that could sit quite easily within the catalogues of a Springsteen or a Mellancamp. Tackling themes like the downfall of small-town America, the yearning for true connection and the socioeconomic wreckage of unconstitutional politics, Barham’s lyrics paint pictures wrapped around a rock and roll soundtrack.
Opening track Dollar General sets the tone and tempo of what is to come. Set to a pulsating rhythm the lyrics get straight to the heart of the issues facing small town USA, themes those aforementioned legends of the genre were addressing forty years ago. “This factory shut down in 93, now this town is a shadow of what it used to be……even the Dollar General is closing down, we’d fix it if we could, but we don’t know how.” Barham wrote Twin Flames for his wife and here, what is a heartfelt love song lyrically, is delivered in typically riotous fashion to a brass accompaniment that could have come straight out of the Clarence Clemons, E-Street Band playbook.
That hugely impactful brass intervention typifies to a great extent what makes American Aquarium such a compelling listen. While the pace of the album rarely lets up, and certainly it is the guitars that drive the whole piece forward in the main, there are tracks like History Repeats Itself where it is the piano-driven accompaniment that stands out and offers the point of difference. It is these subtle changes of emphasis, along with Barham’s intelligent lyrics, that keep the album fresh and avoids a lapse into the territory of hackneyed rock and roll by numbers.
Produced again by multi-time Grammy winner Shooter Jennings, New Ways To Lose was recorded in Los Angeles over a 10-day session with much of the record tracked live, with Jennings encouraging spontaneity and instinct over perfection. The album certainly has the energy of a live performance about it and, if any more encouragement were needed, then UK audiences could do a lot worse than seek the band out on their brief UK tour in the autumn.
