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.