The sirenesque sound of a mirage, Eve Adams shimmers convincingly on American Dust.

Release Date: 22nd August 2025

Label: Basin Rock

Format: CD / Vinyl / Digital

UNFORGIVING, BLEAK AND BEAUTIFUL

There’s something about a really hot day, and we’ve had a few, where sound seems to just hang in the air, soaring, gliding and, ultimately, distorting away into the distance. This is the sound captured by Eve Adams, a distillation of influences and terroir, where to even breathe is exhausting. Equal parts Hope Sandoval (Mazzy Star) and Lana Del Rey, she translocates her previous gothic noir into an unforgiving landscape, both bleak and beautiful.

Album number four for the Californian, it is underwritten by her own move into the middle of nowhere, to the barren deserts of the American Southwest, where dreams can become dust. This is exemplified by the opener, Nowhere Now, which has shimmery guitars hovering around her vocal, as she hits all the notes she needs to, blurring still more. This is the sound of a mirage. And remember those chimy notes from Neil Young’s Harvest Moon, well they get dragged into the overall eerie stringscape offered, suggesting a kinship with the Canadian’s own ideas of paradise. “Stay away from me“, Adams keens, “I’m nowhere now“. But that battle is lost, your duration guaranteed.

SPECTRAL HARMONIES AND TIMELESS TWANG

The impressive start leads to the simpler fingerpick of Couldn’t Tell The Time, with spectral harmonies and timeless twangs, drifting in as if from an old movie. A gentle and reassuring saw of fiddle adds to the atmosphere, at both odds and at one with the orchestration. The lyric perfectly captures that time of day where it feels it could go either way, day to night or night to day, yet is neither one or the other, stuck between the two in suspension. Strangers then emerges, carried in on doleful strings and a dragging beat, a near nursery tale of brooding malevolence. If echoes of Young inhabit Nowhere Now, here the ghost of Leonard Cohen stalks.

Rather Be Here wobbles in with a similar deceptive simplicity, the mood more hopeful, with a lonely harmonica vying with the slow tonk of a piano. Her voice is barely present, just sufficient to denote acquaintance with the melody, and is altogether thoroughly beguiling.

THE CITY IS TOO LOUD

I’m unsure the target of Dirty Thirties; as with all the tracks, her voice is mixed low and hard to grasp without full concentration, which the foreboding musical backdrop has a tendency to then take. Suffice to say, it is a song of warning, whereas Amen, which follows, with the sounds of an incoming train, seems more upbeat, as well as offering a wry nod to her timbre: “The city is too loud to try and make out the words to that song in your head“. Some jangly guitar and hoedown fiddle blend into a Hollywood 30s style soundtrack, or, if not then, certainly sometime before technicolour, as Adams croons the song title. An ensemble chorale then take it back still further in time, into medicine show territory. Utterly odd, utterly infectious. It’s quite a tale, and worth the extra attention.

SONGS IN BLACK AND WHITE

Get Your Hopes is a woozy doo-wop without the doo-wop, that provided by the eccentric backing of instrumentation. Her voice swoops over vintage steel guitar and piano, with a cha cha beat for propulsion. Which makes the piano scale that opens Ricochet all the more unexpected, if swiftly welcome. Another song in black and white, with some lonesome Gypsy fiddle meandering behind that piano and Adams’ never more languid vocal. However, this time, it is the black and white of a David Lynch dream sequence, with Adams channelling the full Julee Cruise. These two songs would be a good place to dip first into this album for flavour, not least as Ricochet bursts into a delicious late bloom of fading grandeur.

After such exoticism, Ask Me starts as a lazier strum, with an eerie keyboard backdrop, until again that spectre of fading Hollywood charm becomes evident. Once more I sense a tap into Neil Young’s imagination, Expecting To Fly or fragments of Broken Arrow. If this is real or my imagination, who cares, it is still wonderful. The final track is very much the final track, a paean to the environment described and, thus, to the album itself. Death Valley Forever, with piano and yearning harmonica, feels like an ending, and Adams sings this hymn with evident love in her voice.

MYSTICAL MAGIC

This is something very special. Adams has spun a mystical magic into the barren beauty of her chosen home, with both dread and longing sharing her stage. If the songs are the stars, the production provides the sky to show them best off, this coming courtesy Bryce Cloghesy, aka Military Genius, who, with Adams, co-produces and provides much the playing. My copy didn’t offer any further credits or either the lyrics, which might be a gripe, but is actually a relief, in hindsight. Anything that diverts from full immersion into this warm wash of sound might actually detract.

Couldn’t Tell The Time. With lyrics!

Eve Adams: Website / Linktree / x / instagram

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