Top 10 Americana Albums of 2011

-Sylvie Simmons, MOJO

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"Travels in the Dustland conjures up a haunting, almost mythical American landscape of lost highways and endless skies... worthy of far wider attention."
- Q, UK

 

"The Walkabouts don't make records often these days but when they do, they're usually worth hearing. In the past they've blended various European influences along with their core Americana style, but on this they come across like the Seattle equivalent of Calexico, with a song-cycle about the desert, viewed as lure and desolation, dreamscape and death.

There's a distinct No Country for Old Men vibe about songs like "They Are Not Like Us" and "No Rhyme, No Reason", in which songwriter Chris Eckman describes the emptiness "wrapped tight around you like the branches of a mesquite tree". The backdrops feature dark sheets of strings and organ, the occasional lonely trumpet, and lumpy, superstitious drums driving the menacing Western mythos to its doom: not a forgiving place, but an engrossing one."

- The Independent

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"One reason to be cheerful is that the Walkabouts are still going after more than a quarter of a century. Another is that they can put out an album as good as this when they've worked so long together. For more than a decade, their music has taken on a more cinematic sweep, and that seems to find its apex in this journey through a mythical American Southwest. It's an epic ambition, and one that they pull of magnificently, in large part because they have such excellent material -- and it's all very definitely Walkabouts in its sound -- with some glorious lyrics from Chris Eckman..."

- Chris Nickson, AllMusic Guide