Nick Gusman and the Coyotes “Lifting Heavy Things”

Repackaged 1990s alt-country time travel trips have rarely felt this rewarding.

It’s far easier said than done, but why does this album, the third by St. Louis outfit Nick Gusman and the Coyotes, and as fine a piece of 1990s alt-country revivalism as you could wish for, collate together so well and remain a real pleasure on the ear after multiple listenings?

For one thing, nearly all the reasons why americana fans so often hark back to the 1990s as the golden age of the genre are present on ‘Lifting Heavy Things’, and in abundance. First and foremost, the punchy, tightly disciplined sound that came to characterize the very best music (well, ok, americana) of that particular decade, pulling together the compact killer tunes of pop’s new wave with the lilting edge of traditional country, is very much present and correct. No matter which of the ten tracks on ‘Lifting Heavy Things’ you go for first, it’s like a time trip back to an age when deftly constructed, unpretentious lyrics and attractively straightforward melodies ruled the musical (well, ok, americana) roost.

So it’s evident from this album that Gusman and his five-piece backing band have an admirably clear-eyed appreciation of the strengths of 1990s alt-country. But what surely promotes ‘Lifting Heavy Things’ from the category of ‘memorably good’ to something even more superior is how effectively other musical influences and styles are weaved into the album as well.

There’s the lilting off-beat zydeco tones on ‘Trucker’ and ‘We Got A Job to Do’, for example, or the crunchy classic soul base of ‘Stray Dog’, or the unvarnished rock and roll bop of  ‘Slow Down Katie’ or the honky tonk country tones of the title track itself. And so on and so on. But these nods towards the general collective of popular American music don’t make the whole album sound disjointed or ramshackle: far from it. Rather each new variation on its central 1990s theme is handled with so much confidence and vigour by Gusman and co –  some superb violin accompaniments courtesy of Sean Kamery being one particular constant highlight – that it simply intensifies your sense of anticipation as to what could be coming up next.

‘Lifting Heavy Things’  is built on such rock-solid musical foundations, in fact, that when it comes to the remainder of its architecture it can risk some more radical designs without worrying about the whole house falling in. The most eye-catching of these experiments grows out of one of the longest tracks, the six-minute ‘Shortcut the Mountain’, which starts off as a fairly structured swamp blues-rock number, but stretches out on the skyline with a furiously energetic extended jam session, the guitars drawing momentum off each other as the track builds to a crescendo. Most of the album is tautly cohesive so this kind of spontaneous blast-out – right down to somebody saying ‘let’s go!’ as the track kicks off – is refreshingly different, and it also strongly suggests this band would be a whole lot of fun to see live, as well.

Much as the 1990s alt-country component of ‘Lifting Heavy Things’ acts as a framework for other musical influences, rather than squeezing them out, the lyrics also use a bedrock of tried-and-tested americana scenarios – the dead-end hotel, deadend jobs, the trucker out on the road, the girl/boy next door who likes to party a little too hard –  but as starting-points, not ends in themselves. Two of the most striking instances are the familiarly rundown backdrop of  ‘Tokyo Hotel’  [apparently a real down-at-heel hotel in Chicago that closed in 2013] that melds into an affectionate and passsionate daydream about a lost love, or when the monotonous, work routines in the opening lines of ‘American Dreams’ blend with surreal, loosely linked stories of the USA’s chronic social divisions and gun violence. But there are plenty more where they came from.

If you wanted more up-to-date external references for how ‘Lifting Heavy Things’ sounds than the 1990s,  for this reviewer at least the stream of irreverent, ever-so-slightly sardonic observations on everyday life, laidback vocal delivery and sharp-as-hell musical delivery is also very evocative of  Texas singer-songwriter Hayes Carll. (It maye helps that on LHT’s title track, one line “If I may be so bold” is also the name of a Carll tracks on his 2019 album ‘What It Is’ , but even if that’s just happy coincidence, the two still seem to have a lot in common.)

Formed in 2018, nearly two decades after Carll began playing, Nick Gusman and the Coyotes are a relatively new band, too, and when they sing the praises of their chosen profession to the rooftops in the closing track, ‘We Got A Job To Do’, with wonderful lines like

“There ain’t nothing in the world that makes me feel this good by far
Than brand new strings on a Telecaster guitar”

you can’t help wondering if with time they’ll end up more world-weary and cynical about life on the road for fulltime musicians. Hopefully not, but for now their huge enthusiam for their vocation and equally impressive musical talent is evident throughout every last verse of ‘Lifting Heavy Things’ –  and nobody’s complaining about that at all.