Roots music is enjoying quite the revival right now in both the United States and Canada, and among the more interesting groups to have won the favor of audiences on both sides of the border is none other than Patiently Awaiting the Meteorite, whose new music video for “Devil’s In My Car” has captured the attention of many audiences and critics around the world this fall. One of the more deliberate and straightforward compositions on their first LP Canyon Diablo, “Devil’s In My Car” is both an experiment in alternative singer/songwriter melodies and a tribute to the Canadian folk-rock of yore, and it’s a song that I haven’t been able to stop spinning since its debut.
Some would compare the structure of this track to old school Americana, but I find it to be much more uniquely Canadian in every way that truly matters. There’s a lot of Neil Young energy in the vocal, but bigger than that is the flat-out exploitation of a British folk harmony that you would never find in a stateside indie singer/songwriter scene. This is northern balladry with a decidedly exotic twist, and it’s not something that I think any American band could replicate at the moment.
The guitars have a lot more varnish on them in the master mix than they actually need, but the melodies that they create are still rock-solid just the same. I don’t think Patiently Awaiting the Meteorite needed to polish the production quality of both the video and the single as much as they did, and honestly I’d love to hear them try something a little more barebones in the future. They’ve got a beautiful chemistry together, and it certainly doesn’t need any filtrations to connect with listeners of all backgrounds and tastes.
It would be really interesting to see Patiently Awaiting the Meteorite deliver an additional live music video for “Devil’s In My Car,” if only to hear and experience how they play the song on stage. Don’t get me wrong; the video for this single is as fun a watch as any, but it doesn’t quite match the powerful depth of emotion that we hear in every second of music that plays on in the background of every shot. Hearing “Devil’s In My Car” makes me want to see this band in person, and that’s essentially what makes it the perfect single for the group to have released from Canyon Diablo.
I think they’ve still got a lot of ground left to cover as a band, but Patiently Awaiting the Meteorite are demonstrating in this latest release that they have all the right mojo to accomplish great things if they set their mind to it. “Devil’s In My Car” wasn’t designed to appeal to the more progressive folkies and roots rockers in North America exclusively, but if it can find a consistently interested audience outside that growing group of listeners, it stands a good chance of paving a way into the mainstream for this band and the scene they represent in Canada. The bottom line? I’m definitely impressed enough to stay tuned.
Jodi Marxbury