A.A. BONDY
American Hearts
(Fat Possum)
By Todd Lavoie
Fans of the Birmingham, Ala., grunge-rocking outfit Verbena will likely be mightily surprised by the latest move from former lead howler Scott Bondy: the vocalist, having re-named himself A.A. Bondy in the process, swapped the band’s familiar flannel-isms for moody Delta folk-blues on his solo debut, American Hearts, and the results are a hugely successful re-invention for the artist.
Recorded in a converted barn in the quiet Catskills hamlet of Palenville, N.Y. – most famous for its role as an epicenter of the Hudson River school of romantic landscape painting – the album plays intriguing games with concepts of time and place, making over Bondy’s idyllic new home as a Civil War battleground while offering torrents of hellfire-burning Biblical imagery as well. As it turns out, Southern Gothic knows no boundaries.
Bondy’s husky, weather-beaten rasp proves to be an enormously versatile instrument amid the stark atmospherics of this largely acoustic affair, bristling with end-is-nigh menace on the knife-wielding blues of “How You Will Meet Your End,” but still capable of generating ravishingly woozy gospel fervor on the shuffling “Rapture (Sweet Rapture).” The full-length’s complicated balance of despair and spirituality comes to a head on “Vice Rag,” a Jesus-come-hither Delta hoedown punctuated by conflicting pleas of “sweet, sweet cocaine / won’t you all be mine.” American Hearts’s true highlight, however, is the title track: a protest anthem in which Bondy’s Jesus steers clear of the disc’s ever-looming violence and instead fights for peace: “If your God makes war, then he’s no God I know, ‘cause Christ would not send boys to die.”