Alternative
Transmit Sound / Thirty Tigers · 28 August 2026
“Kaleidosphere (Devil His Due)” (3:09) runs three minutes flat with no bridge and no solo: it is exactly the song Jay Farrar has been writing for thirty years, and as an opener it does the job. Sound Signal Serenades is twelve songs and forty and a half minutes, and it is Son Volt’s first record of new songs since Electro Melodier (2021); Day of the Doug (2023), the one in between, was a Doug Sahm tribute.
The band playing it is the standing one: John Horton on electric, slide and baritone guitar, Mark Spencer on electric and keyboards, Andrew Duplantis on bass and Mark Patterson on drums, with Farrar on voice, acoustic guitar, lap steel and piano, and producing. On “Away From the Blues” (3:26) organ and piano cross into a swirl the quintet rebuilds with guitars by the end of “Serenade Song” (4:02), and the lap steel on “Don Quixote’s Dream” (3:48) runs straight into Spencer’s acoustic slide on “The High Wall / Carnival Country” (2:23).
The variety lives in those details. “The New Low-Down” (2:34) puts a Farfisa organ up front and repeats a refrain until it is nearly pop; “This Mess Of A World” (2:08) is a foreshortened blues with the plainest lyric here; “Illinois Central” (4:45) is the longest track and the closest to the gallops on Trace (1995); and “New Born Soul” (4:16) closes on an openly gospel gesture.
Two things get in the way, though. The first is that the album was cut in several places with different engineering teams and, much as Farrar stitches it together as producer, not one of the twelve songs reaches five minutes: the whole thing moves at a single pace, and that nasal monotone of a voice, recognisable instrument though it is, does not help. The second is more practical and worse for a writer whose case rests on words: the release carries no lyrics, on the disc or online, and songs like “Don Quixote’s Dream” or “Walkin’ In A Maze” (3:05) ask to be read.
Twelve tracks, out on Transmit Sound and distributed by Thirty Tigers on 28 August. “Serenade Song” had come out as an advance single on 31 July.
Rating: 7.2/10
Text by Marçal Bonastre