American Motors: Content

“I’m not sure of anything anymore,” admits Dustin Travis White on Three Crosses. Not only is it one of the many illuminating moments on American Motors’ debut album, Content, but also after the last couple of weeks, it bottles up an air of menace that forms a stark present and even starker future.

Alongside White, American Motors are rounded out by bassist Brad Williams and drummer, Alex Steward. Instead of just existing and turning into husks like most of us either approaching or having hit 40, the Lancaster, Pennsylvania-based three-piece decided to write songs about it. Take the gruelling penultimate track, Evil Twin. Featuring one of the many downtrodden characters littered throughout Content, in this instance, they are talked off the ledge of a bridge above the Ohio River, with themes of suicide and split personalities overshadowing the wandering gloom rock American Motors dispense.

Formed last year, it’s been a quick trajectory for American Motors. It’s no surprise with the kind of songs they write. Profoundly relatable, as the worn threads of the working class are woven through an equally faded patchwork, and on Content, the band present a sharp, informed idea of the existential crisis.

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Starting with a concoction of swirling shoegaze and slow-motion sludge on Colonial Lanes – another tale from one of the many broken voices across working class America, and it’s here where those “low streets lights” White sings about tell their own story.

With heaving walls of sound faintly echoing the majesty of I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness, on (A Billboard Reding) Dissolve Jefferson White’s story of Smiley’s lounge on fire and being kept awake by cheap drugs is the kind of yarn that could have featured in the works of Willy Vlautin.

It’s not the only time fire features through White’s musings on Content, and on the shadowy Tamarak, the protagonist does their best to escape one (in a metaphorical sense). In search of a Greyhound bus “waiting to get gone” and “trying to become something new”, it’s a story that resonates with a raw reality. Ending in the kind of relatable despair that such scenarios often bring, White’s character is later seen at the county line making ends meet by “pushing plates around” at a diner.

Elsewhere, The Former Mall Anchor Store Call Center Blues is a straight-down-the-lens fuck you to capitalism. With Williams’ cyclic, repetitious bass line, White delivers a stirring indictment on gentrification and the amalgamation of old and new money; the venom, slowly dripping as he parts with each word.

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In its own way, A Half Finished Wall of Glass Blocks harbours similar notions. A story of growing older and being pushed further away into the enclaves of suburbia, it’s these landscapes where the song’s protagonist navigates through a debauched haze of substance to escape the morbid realities (“How many times did we trudge through the snow to funeral home?). As White professes to nostalgia not being what it used to be, it’s a snapshot of the glory days eroding with age.

Which leads into closing song, Statues. It sees American Motors channelling the void-like post-punk that FACS have mastered during this decade. It frames what American Motors have created on Content. Thematically, the band captures these times flush, and whilst sonically abstract in nature, there’s also a liminality that echoes all the uncertainty we face. With one foot in the past and one in the present, where do we move to next?

Often, the key is to move forward, but with the future looking as ominous as it’s ever has been for our generation, is moving forward actually the best way? These are the questions that American Motors ask, and through the lens of the life-damaged, they frame that uncertainty with a street level honesty that few others have matched this year.

Content is out now via Expert Work Records. Purchase from Bandcamp.