David Nance seems like a true rock’n’roll apostle. Tell him about a record you love—especially in his personally fertile triangle anchored by Neil Young, MC5, and Faust—and the mid-Nebraska native might reveal his secret codex of deeper cuts with glee. For a decade now, Nance’s own music has gushed from that same wellspring, a torrent of two dozen LPs, EPs, and singles that map his many enthusiasms. On 2016’s More Than Enough, he slipped from New Zealand pop bittersweetness to full-choogle vamps in half an hour; he started 2022’s wonderfully warped Pulverized and Slightly Peaced with a two-minute, anti-capitalist barnburner about sandwiches and ended with a curled Crazy Horse jam about the crumbling New Age. Nance has even taken to making barely rehearsed, full-length covers of touchstones: Beatles for Sale, Doug Sahm and Band, Lou Reed’s Berlin. If Midwest boredom can create a vacuum, Nance’s now overflows with the blessed zeal of a beatific lifer.
But David Nance & Mowed Sound—the self-titled debut of his newest configuration of familiar Omaha friends—suggests a limit to this vintage discipleship for the first time. This is Nance’s debut on Third Man, following appearances on Ba Da Bing! and Trouble in Mind that were occasionally so intoxicating they intimated the rise of some anachronistic latter-day rock star, gloriously unkempt and unbound. These 10 songs survey Nance’s usual range, with doffs of the beard to Canned Heat, the Kinks, Skip Spence, and Gram Parsons.
It also feels circumscribed and safe, though, as if Nance and a band capable of truly cutting loose tried to make their own modern classic rock LP by forsaking the weirdness and wildness that made them special. (This same band, Nance included, is much sharper on Bite Down, the forthcoming LP from Rosali Middleman.) Ever zoom in on a soft-focused picture that appeared magical from a distance, only to find its charm diminished as the supposed details never actually resolve? This record confirms Nance’s work has always been that way—better blown out or faded away, not up close and clean like they are here.
To be clear, there are absolute jams here, searing reminders of or mighty introductions to Nance’s antiquarian power. “Mock the Hours” barrels from the gates like an Allman-powered anthem, Kevin Donahue’s drums kicking the shit beneath Nance’s crosscut riff. Howling from rock’s under-funded fringes about outlasting long odds, Nance sounds like the leader of some mid-’90s alternative-rock band whose regional hit somehow broke big. It’s an inescapable tune, its sharp hook set into place by piano that pokes like fingers to the ribs. “Credit Line” turns a similar trick, its lithe little lick seemingly exported duty-free from some Mississippi roadside dive. It scores Nance’s lament perfectly. The compulsive mantra of “Cure Vs. Disease,” the winking fuck-you refrain of “Side Eyed Sam,” the rhythmic moan of “Cut It Off”: There is no doubt on Mowed Sound that Nance can write and lead a tune. Each song is a crosshatch of touchstones iconic, obscure, and everything in between—ZZ Top to Otha Turner, John Lee Hooker to Little Feat. Here is Nance’s record collection as potent distillate.
Longtime Nance accomplice James Schroeder recorded Mowed Sound in bursts that stretched nearly 18 months, meaning the band didn’t decamp to a lavish studio with hired hands on account of its well-heeled new label. It does, however, sometimes seem so, with performances that always stop short of escape velocity, as though afraid to exit some imagined radio land. The lick and groove of “Side Eyed Sam” sound predestined for infinite repetition and variation, but the band fades out after three minutes. The smoke dissipates just when you think you see the fire. “Credit Line,” likewise, frames a playground for the tangled guitars of Nance and Schroeder, but they squeeze in a few succinct duets before drifting away. This take is listed as “Variation #5,” and Nance roared on a mighty live version captured and released in late 2022. As with half the great songs on Mowed Sound, it’s hard not to hear what feels like a half-there take and think, “Please, go on.”
The eccentricity is, instead, crammed into corners this time—ride cymbals that land like little earthquakes during “No Taste Tart Enough,” for instance, or the brief and ecstatic tape piece, “Molly’s Loop.” Nance includes two country ballads here, partnering with Pearl Lovejoy-Boyd to conjure Parsons and Emmylou Harris on Grievous Angel for “Tumbleweed” and closing with the Southern exile torment of “In Orlando.” These are exquisite and aching songs, suggesting that Nance has found yet another avenue for exploration. But on Mowed Sound, these anomalies squander momentum and take up the space where this band could and should be opening up, taking these open-ended songs for extended escapades across Nebraska flatlands.
When the David Nance Group released a single on Third Man in 2019, it was tempting to picture Nance as a spiritual successor to The White Stripes and The War on Drugs. Those bands, after all, reached wide audiences with versions of rock that long ago went endangered, in part because they believed in the form so much. So, obviously, does Nance. But as good as it often is, Mowed Sound reinforces what, in retrospect, has been Nance’s conundrum all along: He remains the clerk across the record store counter, gushing about all the things he loves without being able to tell you the one he likes best, the one he would forever commit to calling his own.
