The American West (a project by Portland songwriter Matthew Zeltzer), release their debut album, The Soot Will Bring Us Back Again, a record full of grit, desolation, and heartbreak, darkness and soul. The bulk of the album was recorded live to two-inch tape in three days at Portland’s The Hallowed Halls, with the help of engineer Jordan Richter (Band Of Horses, Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band, Plastic Ono Band). They Say The Soot Will Bring Us Back Again is full of fingerpicked folk songs flecked with pedal steel and raucous country-rockers, but the focus remains on Zeltzer’s ragged poetry throughout.


Matthew Zeltzer, who performs as The American West, hails from Steinbeck’s California - a land of farms and working-class beach towns, where people still work the land and where a historic drought is not just a news story, but a threat to one’s livelihood. Bleak landscapes such as these serve as fitting backdrops for the these songs of love and heartbreak, staged on the brink of an environmental apocalypse on The American West’s debut full-length album, They Say The Soot Will Bring Us Back Again.