ALBUM REVIEW: Nick Gusman & The Coyotes Prove Their Mettle on ‘Lifting Heavy Things’

Nick Gusman & The Coyotes don’t do half measures, as evidenced by their barnstorming third album, Lifting Heavy Things, which has all the markings of a soon-to-be critical and commercial breakthrough. By the time the LP’s second track, “Sound of A Broken Heart” has finished, the band have already placed themselves firmly in the lineage of greats like Lucero, Springsteen, and Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit. 

Like those acts, the band here demonstrate a preternatural knack for packaging knotty emotions and uncomfortable truths into unpretentious couplets that cut to the heart of the matter (“And I’m looking for the pain again / Because it’s something I know”). “Broken Heart,” like many of the songs that follow, rushes to big, anthemic climaxes where fiddle, drums, and guitar crescendo into a cacophony. But such dramatic moments (and Lifting Heavy Things has no shortage of them) never feel unearned or forced – there’s a dynamism, sincerity and rawness to the band’s expression that proves reliably winning. 

Like Springsteen and Isbell, Gusman & co are big believers in the character portrait – sketching various personalities who at their very best have a wider story to tell about America in 2024. Across these 10 tracks, we meet a charismatic sex worker in the “Tokyo Hotel,” the fast-living eponymous character of “Slow Down Katie,” an injured refugee seeking the “American Dream,” and a strung-out “Trucker” going down in an epic police chase. All these characters (and many more) act as stand-ins for different parts of the nation’s wounded psyche – disillusionment with once-accepted truths, a strained but resilient belief in the country’s stated promise, and reckless abandon committed under the false pretense of invincibility. It all adds up to an immensely powerful songwriting statement.

Lifting Heavy Things was recorded live, with virtually no overdubbing. The LP also grew out of an extensive U.S. tour – and one can easily imagine these songs gaining form across these performances, becoming bolder, brasher and more boisterous with each successive live rendition. In the end, this unlikely band lineup – whose members’ roots traverse bluegrass, jazz and hardcore – lost none of their spontaneous live energy in recording these songs for their third album. The band quickly turns the energy up to 10 and keep it there for 41 minutes; “Pick up the pace man / We got a job to do,” goes the album’s final song, a sentiment the band seem to have taken on as a mission statement. 

Nick Gusman & The Coyotes’ Lifting Heavy Things releases on Dec. 6.