Being a Rust Belt rocker is valuable currency these days. The region seems to be rich in bands stylized in the old school rock model: no frills instrumentation, deep knowledge of the legends and a sound that’s as scrappy and raggedy as it is powerful and assured. The most notable group in this category is The Black Keys, which cast its net in the American South and came up with a sound drenched in crossroads blues and garage-rock fervor. Former labelmates Heartless Bastards have instead looked west, keeping the toughness but venturing into territory wider and more open to experimentation. The cover for the band’s latest release, _Arrow_, says it all. It’s a bison silhouetted in brush, craggy peaks and twilight stars. Their sound is as much: expansive, rustic, muscular and just a bit cosmic.
Originally more in the vein of ’70s metal and early Led Zeppelin, Heartless Bastards have moved on and matured. Metal is still part of the equation, but the American West now seems irremovable from their sonic makeup. The acoustic work is twangy and rustic, the electric work has a Texas heartland drawl and the vast soundscapes suggest nothing but open skies and endless highways. However, what makes the band truly distinct is bandleader Erika Wennerstrom’s voice. It sounds doused in eggs and sawdust in equal measure, husky enough to withstand her muscular guitar backing yet surprisingly rubbery and malleable. Listen to “Only for You.” Wennerstrom rolls the vocal line around her mouth like a jawbreaker and spits it out on a bed of guitars to equal her commitment.
And those guitars are generally spectacular. Wennerstrom and guitarist Mark Nathan have a nice interplay that lets these tracks breathe with just a bit of jangle. The full spectrum is here. “Simple Feeling” is a hot air blast, thick with reverb and solo explosions without the bombast, while “Skin and Bones” is a woodsy acoustic showcase that’s light and warm. And the band is skilled enough to find the middle ground of these extremes. Songs like “Parted Ways” blend aggression and subtlety.
As gorgeous as the guitar work is, it’s Wennersrom’s show. She dominates _Arrow_, imbuing the album with a sense of epic scope the instruments only begin to suggest. Especially on the longer cuts, she’s able to create buildups both rustic and panoramic. The opener, “Marathon,” shows her doing so much with very little. Over what is essentially a oceanic guitar riff and some bass fills, she lays on the vocals with lyrics that are equally touching. “We’re all racing down the street/and we’re all racing for our own reasons,” she sings, making six minutes pass in a breeze. It’s a bold decision to open _Arrow_ like this, but it’s just a table-setter that displays Wennersrom’s vocal engagement. Her skill at handling long cuts is all over the album. “The Arrow Killed the Beast” is all cowboy mythos and spooky ghost town guitars; the band straddles the line between epic and cheeky. Likewise, “Low Low Low” could have been a dull exercise, but instead, it’s a revealing slice of smoky Appalachian folk.
Sometimes the group betrays this lightness (“Down In the Canyon” is a little too much Zeppelin heaviness), but overall, this is the cleanest and most flexible the band has ever sounded. _Arrow_ reveals its subtleties through repeat listens until it’s mentally well-worn and burnished, just like the album’s sound. It sounds fantastic, but more than anything, it introduces Wennerstrom as a new kind of vocalist to be reckoned with. Fierce, versatile and genre-savvy, her style represents the Heartless Bastards’ sound in general, and _Arrow_ makes a convincing argument Westward Ho is as good a direction as any to take a solid garage-rock sound into interesting, rewarding territory.
**4 out of 5.**