Notes Campfire

The story of Souled American is one of a group disappearing over the horizon – though they do still exist, and at the time of writing (March 2025), have a new album ready to be released. The gap between this forthcoming new album, and its predecessor, Notes Campfire, is only 29 years or so – not too long in the scheme of things. It’s quite some achievement to start out wanting to merge reggae and country, and then somehow to end up with an album as self-contained and deconstructed as Notes Campfire, but the thing with Souled American is, all of their moves have always felt completely unforced: this is just how the music goes. On Notes Campfire, that means two guitars strumming, almost in tandem, but with a strange, spatialised quality – almost dub-like, really – that renders everything out of sync; songs that meander, not slowly, but at the pace of breathing, like “Flat”, which proceeds with stream-of-consciousness illogic. It’s no surprise to discover that one of the group’s production tricks here was to record the core elements of the song and then remove them in the final mix, the better to let everything hang in space, unanchored, drifting, as though the music’s all cloud and no sky.