Artist:     Vandoliers

Album:     Forever

Label:     Bloodshot Records

Release Date:     2.22.19

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That’s real Red Dirt country underneath the fingernails of the Vandoliers. Riding in from the Dallas-Fort Worth area in a full cow-punk gallop, the six-piece gang marries gritty authenticity with youthful, freewheeling fire and radiant blasts of Tejano on their first album for Bloodshot Records, and third overall. There is a fiddle in the band, if anyone—like country legends Alabama—was wondering.

Bona fide Texans, the Vandoliers are a rougher, twangier version of the Old 97’s, with Rhett Miller acting as their spirit guide on this journey. They are as capable of summoning the passionate, galvanizing spirit of the Gaslight Anthem and the rowdy punk defiance of the Dropkick Murphys as they are siphoning the gas out of Jason and the Scorchers’ moonshining hot rod. Such combustible elements infectiously shake the rafters in the stirring, never-say-die anthem “Sixteen Years,” a thrilling song of resiliency and resolve carried along by a heady, sing-along chorus and blaring trumpet, and the energetic, Tex-Mex rabble-rouser “Troublemaker,” with its meltdown of furious fiddling and locomotive bluster.

These “Converse cowboys,” as they like to be called, can revive the early torn-and-frayed, alternative-rock glory of the Goo Goo Dolls in the coming-of-age rocker “Nowhere Fast” or warmly embrace the great wide open with big-hearted strumming, rolling piano and feverishly scything violin in “Miles and Miles.” Heartfelt emotions run high throughout Forever, a title that speaks to the Vandoliers’ collective esprit de corps and their sense of adventure.

In the bittersweet, romantic country ballad “Cigarettes in the Rain,” guitarist and gravel-voiced vocalist Joshua Fleming rasps, “She strikes me like a match/when she comes around/I light up fast.” That same excitement is felt in up-tempo wildfires like “Bottom Dollar Boy” and “Tumbleweed,” where Fleming, bassist Mark Moncrieff, drummer Guyton Sanders, fiddler Travis Curry, electric guitarist Dustin Fleming and multi-instrumentalist Cory Graves reach for a shining, sunny catharsis with outstretched arms and drink it in. Vandoliers’ Forever should be writ large across a big, blue Lone Star sky.

—Peter Lindblad