Already obscured by unruly curls and dark sunglasses, guitarist Chris Crigoroff began his Sunday night set by asking, "Could we dim the lights? ... Quite a bit."| Then, looking like two Howard Sterns quaking gently on a darkened stage, he and bassist Joe Adducci slowly picked out the title song of their 1994 record, Frozen. Ensconced in shadows, Crigoroff purposefully twanged his acoustic and Adducci uncorked wavering boomlets from his bass as a mood of midnight lament settled over the room. "It's hard enough to dry an ocean," Grigoroff bayed sadly, "Why won't you stay?"

When the song was finished, he pointed at the last remaining spotlight and said, "I'm not sure I like that, either."

Hailing from Austin, Texas, Souled American began as an organic country rock quartet in 1987. By 1990, they'd released three records on the now-dissolved Rough Trade label (Fe, Flubber, Around the Horn). Soon, Souled American moved to Chicago and became less popular as their records became lovelier and more eccentric. Their next three albums were released in Europe (available only by mail order in the U.S.) and as the alternative country movement gathered steam in America, they seemed to disappear completely. Eventually, rabid underground fandom intervened; all six records have been re-released since last year, on three independent labels (Checkered Past, Catamount, Tumult). At New York's Knitting Factory on July 11, the band, now a duo, played several songs that will appear on their next record.

Taking an awfully long time to tune between songs, Crigoroff and Adducci performed like two guys picking and strumming for old friends in their living room. Bottles of Budweiser littered the stage, the snare drum from the previous band buzzed during the quiet songs and the monitors never quite worked properly. Audience members shouted out requests -- all of which were honored -- and several indescribable moments of warped beauty unfolded along the way during the slowest show this writer has ever witnessed.

Relying on propulsive strumming, Adducci's songs drove harder than Crigoroff's plucked-string laments, but the bassist was at his best when he laced the bucolic songs with electronic effects -- reverbs and echoes on electric guitar and bass that sounded not futuristic but naturalistic. On a new song called "Libertyville," Adducci's guitar echoed as if through a wooded, moonlit valley while Crigoroff sang, "Hey man, your eyes fixed to the ground / Are you lost? or have you found /Another way?"

By this time, people were up and leaving, deserting Souled American in the midst of a passionate, unique performance. The band seemed not to care. When the folks who stuck around unstacked chairs from the corner and sat down in front of the stage, Crigoroff acknowledged them, saying, "We got a living room thing goin' here. I can dig that." Adducci played "One's Closest," a pretty cowboy waltz slated for the upcoming album, and Crigoroff sang "Souvenir," a song by his hero John Prine that includes the spare poetry, "Broken hearts, dirty windows / Make life difficult to see."

Souled American creates about as broken-hearted music as one can find, not destined for much popularity in the Roaring Nineties. To the contrary, songs like "Six Feet of Snow" (from Around the Horn) would fit better on Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music than on VH-1's Pre-Millennial Power Ballads. So what. When Chris Crigoroff reaches down into his George Jones-style lower register to tell about "Six feet of snow / comin' through my radio," he's mining the marrow of country music in a way that Nashville city-slickers never could.

RODD McLEOD
(July 14, 1999)