Americana is a great album, ready to rock from very first track. This album should be part of the soundtrack to your summer.

In the Chicago Tribune, Greg Kot writes,

For this quartet with decades of shared history, the process of recording is a kind of folk music; they set up and play in real time, letting the music ebb and surge in the moment with little regard to technical precision or steady tempos. Snippets of conversation between songs enhance the feeling of a studio session with all the formality of a campfire sing-along.

An unusually intense sing-along with electric guitars, that is. These performances don’t want to further embalm the folk classics, they aim to amplify the blood and violence beneath the pre-school-approved melodies. Young’s guitar punches out Morse Code notes, shadowboxing with Frank “Pancho” Sampedro’s rhythm guitar and Billy Talbot’s bass. Ralph Molina’s drumming moves like a locomotive: deliberate, massive, punctuated by cymbal splashes that suggest a train-whistle blast.