Even during their “heyday,” and even among their contemporaneous peers in the late 1980s and early ’90s, Souled American seemed shrouded in mystery. “I’d like to say I saw them play a lot,” Jeff Tweedy, whose band Uncle Tupelo traversed the same Midwestern clubs and watering holes, recalled in his book World Within a Song, “but owing to their habit of playing in near-total darkness, I’m not sure I ever really ‘saw’ them at all.” Soft-spoken, press-shy, and signed to a British label too busy hurtling toward bankruptcy to give them much support, Souled American entranced a cult of diehards but otherwise fell through the cracks.
There are influential bands that spawn hundreds of soundalikes and then there are influential bands that spawn surprisingly few, not because their influence didn’t resonate but because their sound was so distinct, nobody quite knew how to emulate it. Souled American reside in that rarefied latter category. On a string of singular albums released between 1988 and 1996, they played a woozy brand of underwater country laced with dubby rhythms and, especially later on, strange, languorous guitar textures. They seemed rooted simultaneously in the folk songbook of the distant past and ambient-country modes of the future.
As the genre eventually called alt-country calcified in Souled American’s wake, luminaries like John Darnielle, Will Oldham, and Tweedy himself all evangelized about the Chicago group without ever replicating their sound. A vast gulf separates the wobbly laments of the group’s 1990 masterpiece, Around the Horn, from the youthful exuberance of Uncle Tupelo’s No Depression, released that same year. After releasing two alluringly atmospheric final albums, Frozen and Notes Campfire, on a tiny German label, Souled American essentially vanished by the late ’90s, their discography sliding into out-of-print obscurity. “They haven't toured America for many years,” the Boston Phoenix noted in 1999. “They don’t have publicity pictures or even publicists or even just people picking up telephones shouting the band’s name down the wire in an ecstatic fury.”
And now they’re back. Comprising just two remaining members—guitarist Chris Grigoroff and bassist Joe Adducci—Souled American return, as mysteriously as they faded away, with their first album of the present century. Why did it take 30 years? That, too, is something of a mystery. “I know it’s been 27 years,” Grigoroff told an interviewer in 2023, when the album was supposedly near-complete, “but we never stopped working on it.” Like the band’s classic LPs, Sanctions locates a strange beauty in plaintive sadness and offers no easy answers, just the feeling of being let into a secret world you don’t entirely understand.
Even by Souled American’s standards, these songs sound downright bummed. This isn’t alt-country so much as death-rattle country, as though Grigoroff and Adducci took Hank Williams’ most wincingly lonesome numbers as a starting point but figured the tempos were a little too fast. The cryptic lyrics teem with images of death, decay, and obsolescence. The voices singing them have dropped and deepened. “We are long, long gone,” Grigoroff repeats on the dirge-like closer, “We,” stretching his voice into a weathered moan. Similarly, “Unforgiven” is almost unbearable in its aching frailty: “I passed away,” Grigoroff sings in a throaty wail that grows more and more strained as the song’s circuitous melody unfurls.
Tracks like these—or “Boom Boom,” with its languid tempo and pained vocals that eventually slide into onomatopoeia—may prove a difficult listen for all but the most devoted diehards. They have a gnarled beauty but also a drooping lethargy. What’s missing is not just former drummer Jamey Barnard, whose idiosyncratic, reggae-inspired rhythmic lurch guided early albums like 1988’s Fe, but percussion, period; the duo recorded these songs at home, sans drums or click tracks.
Fortunately, Sanctions balances its downer tendencies with moments of levity and peculiar arrangements that only Souled American could have concocted. Adducci’s endearing, high-pitched vocal twang and loping bass (the deep growl of his six-stringed Fender VI bass remains a unique element of the band’s sound) wind their way through “Living Love,” a weirdo-country ode to a long-term love. (Amusingly, the chorus—“Living love/Our way”—gets so mangled in the singer’s mouth, it sounds like he’s endorsing “living the viral way.”) “Fractured Sun,” with its fretboard-tapping staccato lurch and bleary-eyed chromatic harmonica, hearkens back to the ambient experiments of Notes Campfire. And “Freeing Wheels,” a song said to be “about motion without spectacle,” makes room for some pleasingly melodic piano and bass that rumbles like an ancient car engine periodically revving up.
When My Bloody Valentine take decades to make an album, you can reasonably imagine that Kevin Shields spent the lifespan of a grasshopper laboring over one guitar overdub. But Souled American’s music doesn’t feel labored-over or obsessive. Despite its long gestation, Sanctions never sounds like an album that took 30 years to make. If anything, it sounds bracingly raw and unvarnished, full of empty spaces and coarse, creaky vocal takes. Downbeat strummers like “Stranger” and “Sorry State” practically sound like first takes. “It’s a sorry state/Without a sorry heart,” Grigoroff croons on the latter, dropping his voice into a gravelly moan. During the tune’s outro, he screeches like a caged animal.
With former members Barnard and Scott Tuma (who contributed those subterranean guitar textures to Souled’s ’90s albums) long gone from the lineup, Sanctions thrives on the singular chemistry between Grigoroff and Adducci. They sing in wobbly harmony on “E.Q.,” voices floating in and out of tune. Reemerging at a time when indie-rock and alt-country are mingling to substantial success and when slick, young Americana stars fill stadiums, top mainstream charts, and release data-dumps worth of material, Souled American sounds defiantly anachronistic. Their music was never in fashion, and nor can it fall out of it.
