For her latest record, American Dust, Eve Adams has taken the template of the folk noir sound of its predecessor, Metal Bird. However, this latest album has the distinction of being a more cohesive piece across its ten songs and forty-one minutes’ duration.
Metal Bird was inspired, in part, by Adams’ frequent commutes between her then home of Montreal to Los Angeles during a period of family tragedy, its cover artwork foregrounding a bird set against a jet plane, representing her desire to be as free as a bird. In contrast, the album artwork for American Dust has Adams standing in front of a toy-town-sized prairie house, while behind her, a train crosses its way against the vast California desert backdrop, smoke billowing from its smokestack.
It’s a bold statement of intent – both in a visual and an auditory sense – with Adams metaphorically transporting listeners to the sun-baked desert landscape of the American Southwest, its dust as a symbol of the passage of time, and one which links back to her ancestors’ experience of the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s. Eve Adams is both observer, as well as the principal subject on some of these songs, such as the opening number, Nowhere Now, its sound both languorous – with layers of lush instrumentation – and intensely intimate, its author feeling an intense sense of dislocation: “Stay away from me, I’m nowhere now”.
Couldn’t Tell The Time, with its pleasantly fingerpicked opening and accompanying mournful fiddle, continues in a similar vein, with our protagonist occupying “that border between land and sky”, a liminal space which is neither night nor day: “Is the day about to break ahead?/Is the night about to fall?”
Strangers is a darker and more malevolent beast altogether, a perfect companion piece to a David Lynch film soundtrack; it expresses Eve Adams’ fascination for the darker side of life. It’s a co-write with Bryce Cloghesy, aka Military Genius of Crack Cloud, who plays throughout the album and also acted as its producer. It’s both somnolescent and doleful in feel, while lyrically Adams uses a “howling dog” as a metaphor for a lover who is essentially unknowable: “In the night there’s a dog howling far far away/I think that he’s wild but he could be a stray/And he looks like you, howls like you too/I wish I could make him stay”. The only conclusion to be drawn is a negative one: “let’s say we’re strangers”.
By contrast, Rather Be Here not only demonstrates Adams’ facility for fine lyric writing, but also represents a far sunnier outlook on domestic matters – evidence that love can sustain through both dust and time: “Sometimes I hear that lonesome engine call/Telling me this town is too small/But when I see the big sky in your precious eyes/I’d rather be here than anywhere else”.
The quietly guitar-strummed Dirty Thirties is possibly the most autobiographical song on record, the howling winds at its beginning, blowing the same dust her great-great-grandmother swept off her porch in Oklahoma in 1936 through the cracks of Adams’ windows in her new desert abode.
Adams’ sense of the dramatic reaches its peak on Amen!, its opening one of the most evocative and instantly recognisable in the American literary and cinematic canon, the distinctive wail of a steam train’s locomotive horn, presaging an upbeat ditty whose lighter tone is undercut by the very present threat of climate change: “The West is too dry now, and rates are sky high on wildfire insurance”.
Get Your Hopes Up continues in similar, spirited style, its infectious swagger inviting the listener to share Adams’ belief that love is still worth the gamble – the song “a gentle dare to feel something again” – although break up song, Ask Me (“Tell me why you left that way?”) shows there’s no money back guarantee on future happiness.
Murder ballad with a twist, Ricochet is set to a waltz time signature, with a lovely key change mid song that elevates it above the norm, while the wistful yearning of Death Valley Forever (“I’m still searching for that sweet spot where I see you”) is a fitting coda to this highly impressive song suite.
American dust, then, acts as a motif for the passage of time. But there’s no mote in Eve Adams’ eye, as she’s clearly a songwriter with a keen sense for the visual, the album’s songs a cleverly worked juxtaposition of the intimate experience of the individual, contrasted with the vast expanse of the high desert American landscape. The arrangements may be spare and haunting at times, but are always in service of a vision which is evocative and made fully real.
America Dust (August 22nd, 2025) Basin Rock
