American Ambulance – Sweetness & Dark
This new Brooklyn band has been mixing alt-country twang with the pointed, strong and often melodic songwriting of leader Pete Cenedella in live shows that can recall the electric power of Jason & the Scorchers. Their first disc, balancing smart, hook-driven, slamming-rhythm-section rock with change-up ballads that work, is not just a promising debut, but a formidable one.
While often expanding Mekons-style into a multi-piece and multi-voice alt.country communal orchestra, American Ambulance is built around a core quartet: Scotty Aldrich on screaming slide (“Old Wheels”) that sometimes turns into McGuinn-esque folk-rock picking; Cenedella on often really hard-picked banjo; and “Joe D” and Tim Reedy on rhythm that may include accordion and washboard as well as drums and bass.
This is sometimes pointed political music; the CD is dedicated to both the late Joey Ramone and the very late Wobblie bard Joe Hill. Though composed and recorded before the attack of last September, the band’s “pickin’ up the pieces in our ambulance” theme shows itself in songs that seem to speak to those events.
“Mansion Burning Down”, “(Come Play With Me In) The Debris” and “Nowhere Is Where I Want to Be” are sweet twang ballads, often augmented by fiddle from Marianne Morrison and rendered as duets with guest women vocalists. “Roll Crash & Burn” and an update of “He’ll Set Your Fields On Fire” rock out in the flaming Scorchers mode.
Add in a way with midtempo scruffy indie rock (“Easy”), and the versatility of this group reveals itself. As the CD title aptly suggests, credibly won sadness and hard-won hope (and even happiness) rule here, in an alt-country band that’s both brashly energized and bursting out of their garage already mature.