A.A. Bondy

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ride through the first two tracks on A.A. Bondy's solo debut, American Hearts. The third track, "Black Rain Black Rain", recounts a personal plague, and on the fourth, "Rapture (Sweet Rapture)", he sings about, well, you know: "I don't want to talk about Jesus, I just want to see his face." Beset with demons but daring the Almighty to appear, Bondy has clearly forsaken the rock crunch of his former band Verbena-- which, despite their one-time hype, turned out to be a house built upon the sand-- and has reinvented himself as a southern preacher type, steeping blues-folk sermons in Biblical imagery and seeing fire and brimstone on the horizon, LOVE and HATE tattooed on his knuckles.

And yes, American Hearts can get a little heavy-handed, and yes, using "upon" instead of "on" (as in "like a ghost upon the breeze" or "six riders upon the ridge tonight") isn't fooling anyone. On the other hand, there's a dark gravity to this album, as if Bondy is carrying a heavy burden through a Civil War picaresque: American Hearts is an unfolding tableau of hell on earth as seen by a weary set of eyes and described with a troubadour's guitar and an obsessive's mastery of form and musical history. Those are blues line repetitions on "How Will You Meet Your End" and "Killed Myself When I Was Young", and they press the unanswerable questions and the doomsday imagery. That's actually a rag he's playing on "Vice Rag". That's New Orleans on "Rapture (Sweet Rapture)", conjured with Bondy's bleakly concise lines "you see that levee it's bound to break/ Put the children in the boat." And that's Bondy reclaiming Christ as a peacenik on the title track: "If your God makes war, then's he's no God I know," he sings, hinting at the Dylanesque protest made obvious by the harmonica solo, "'cause Christ would not send boys to die."- Pitchfork