ALBUM REVIEW

Coyote is a loud record. Loud in a lot of ways, every time I cue the record up for I am surprised at how much sound comes out of my headphones, every time. It is also just a big bad record. It thunders and roars. There are guitar solos everywhere (this is to be expected in a three guitar band, but still!) and they pop out at you like they’ve been waiting in the grass just behind every chorus.

 

Coyote is the first offering from Laramie’s five-piece alt-country outfit Bondurant. Many of the band members have followed the well tread trajectory of punk and hard rockers who have gravitated to the textures of country music, souther rock, and the hey day of the American Rock’n’Roll Band as they ease into middle age. These are men who will have intelligent conversations with you about ZZ Top and The Cramps or Kyuss and Hank Williams.

 

Longtime Laramie music scene aficionados will also note that three-fifths of Bondurant, guitarist Tony Frost and frontman Bob Lefevre, were once in Laramie heavy rockers Looker. At their heaviest moments, like album closer “Pig Iron,” Bondurant seems to channel the kind of punk rock energy that was once present in their previous bands, but this is mostly in the wall of guitars and pounding drums. The vocals are deeper, in both pitch and subject matter, and the songs are allowed time to breath. Less rapid fire attack and more inching into an untapped source of melancholy and disillusion.

 

Tracks like “Don’t Make It So Hard” are filled with the kind of characters that exist for the purposes of writing country songs. The opening lines (“Well he’s kind of a prick when he drinks too much beer/And he drinks too much beer every night”) describe the kind of complicated relationship that one has when living in small towns, with a small recurring cast of local assholes. The subtle politics of dealing with people you may not like but not having the ability to avoid or shut them out. If Cheers was set in the Buckhorn Bar this could be the theme song, suck it ‘everybody knows your name’ and welcome: “That son-of-a-bitch ‘aint got a good thing to say ‘bout anybody he could take in a fight.”

 

The characters in “Ninety-Four”, by contrast, are trying their hardest to leave before they have to deal any more with these social dynamics. “In ninety-four you left the town/the city wasn’t big just the only one around… And you got gone”. Almost every line of this song could have been an alternate lyric to “Born To Run”. Not realizing all the best chances of your life had passed you by while you were stuck playing rock ’n’ roll guitar in dive bars.

 

Almost every song in this lot is sad enough to make one crawl into a hole if you let it get inside your head. But sung against blaring Telecasters and with high-end harmony vocals on the chorus these songs feel more like revelations of lives lived than rumination on ones not.

 

This happens nowhere better on the album than in the track “Better Days.” Just like the Boss’ “Glory Days” the track is full of down and out cliche (“The boys at the bar have been drinking their lunch”) and recounts how love can sting a little deeper even when it’s clouded with the haze of memory (“When the radio plays sounds like better days/Even though it just plays that old song.”) In an age where it’s hard to imagine anyone in Bondurant even listening to the radio these lyrics serve as more of an engine for describing emotions of loss.

 

And that might be what Bondurant does best. In a lot of ways it is what rock ’n’ roll does best. Rock music can remind us of a time and place that we were never around for or never even visited. It can make someone who has never been in love feel the pain of heart break.

Bondurant can make you feel like you’ve been drug through the dirt and picked yourself up

again. It can certainly be celebration rock, it can be sitting at the bar alone rock, it can be screaming into the abyss rock. It can also be loud as fuck rock.

-John Wilhelm