American Motors
American Motors are:
Dustin Travis White and Alex D. Steward
Art damaged minimalism or some other hyperbolic nonsense.
It’s probably wise that one “post” is enough. Post-rock. Most “established” record stores have a “post-rock” or “post-punk” section, now, in roaring ‘20s, and every year, as we uncover how glorious those first few Killing Joke albums were, or how influential Magazine, or say, even Shellac, were to a nation of millions, the pile grows taller. And for every inch, there’s a upstart group of misfits in some part of Indiana or Zagreb aping the next iteration of “post” that becomes an en vogue apparition. And we can’t fault those zip guns, they keep the blood flowing. But how do we come full circle, how do we add a “post,” is there life after Red Medicine?
American Motors was established in 2023; not only to clear the drains, but to add that extra “post,” to cleanse the lives of those spent chasing the punk, post-punk, and heck, shoegazing dreams of a generation dosed by the DIY ideals of indie rock. Manipulating a post-pandemic narrative – because why can’t the narrative be manipulated now, by any means necessary? – is the duo of Dustin White and Alex Steward. Both have traveled Lewis and Clark paths towards a musical salvation that put them within the magma. Their CVs too voluminous to get into now, but rest assured, they’re coast to coast post-rock journeymen who have spent just as much time rewiring the gear as they have screen-printing the ‘zines, putting on house shows, and intently studying the lineage of those who came before.
White and Steward talk of an “instant telepathy” when they first meet in Austin. There was a shared sentiment that in that post-pandemic world, the duo wanted to make physical music. Physical in the sense of volume, physical in the sense of hitting your instruments hard. There was a love of early Swans; the physical tumult, and the dust that settles after the storm and stress explodes. In practice, the sound of American Motors pits an enormous and feral rhythm section vs. meditations in minimalism, new age tonality, and repetition.
“Colonial Lanes” is the perfect cultivation of this working-stiff cudgeling meeting its soft, ambient foil. With the scene set in a bowling alley dive bar, with the dredges (fallen angels?) of society “grinding their teeth from grinding those pills,” the song rides a giant, chasm filled, martial beat (the heartbeat from white crosses?), before making room for ripples of atmospheric guitar.
In a song like “The Former Mall Anchor Store Call Center Blues,” the title kind of says it all. At American Motors, the quotidian becomes mythical, just as the post-everything bassline hypnotizes the listener to see something “where a mountain used to be,” there’s beauty in the nothingness, the crusted nihilism, the Dollar General close to the other Dollar General. Here those ripples peek through again, or maybe they’re waves of synth, a snake-church oscillator, and they do it just as relentlessly as the forceful rhythms, the sturm und drang, like sunlight through cheap aluminum mini-blinds.
American Motors reflect that quiet sonic war. A leveling of post-expectations. You can have your corporeal catharsis and carve mazes in your brain at the same time.
“There is a Twin,” is as much Jawbox, as it is Hysteria, as it is Iasos, as it is some post-iteration of Rodan they’ve never heard, or those rediscovered K-Mart loop cassettes. As an anthem of sorts for the band it contains their multitudes, but also a strict code. So ingrained with that blueprint – a post-rock bedrock informed by the metaphysical and the rust and grain belts - the duo, along with bassist Brad Williams, recorded their debut with J. Robbins in Baltimore.
American Motors aren’t re-inventing the wheel as much as they are smashing it to bits, reconfiguring those bits into something that is what? A new wheel? Why not? This is one of those opportunities.
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