Brown Horse gallop ever more confidently on Total Dive

Although Brown Horse are soaked up to their collective armpits in various signifiers of a very recognisably American musical lexicon (pedal steels and the lure of the road leading out of town feature prominently here), the Norwich quartet (accompanied by drummer Ben Rodwell and backing singer Neve Cariad) achieve an identifiably British take on various alt. country/Americana staples on the startlingly assured, often viscerally raw Total Dive.

With all four members sharing the songwriting duties equally, the ten songs on Total Dive venture from grizzled, petrol-fumed bar room boogie (the title track, with the track’s energised gallop deliciously at odds with the downbeat dead-end vibes of the lyrics) to desolate laments such as the tangibly heartbroken, lost and lonely “Wreck”. It’s rare for a band with four equally prominent songwriters to achieve a unified, perfectly gelling cohesion. Brown Horse’s blend of, say, Bruce Springsteen (whose 70s masterpieces are fleetingly referenced on one point of the album) at his least polished, the blue collar ruin and beautifully bruised Crazy Horse-ian crunch of Richmond Fontaine, the tough, dust-blown dynamics and poetic storytelling of Lucinda Williams and the foundational alt. country cornerstones of Uncle Tupelo and very early Wilco manages this with impressive ease: Total Dive sound like the work of a fully united band approaching their creative peak, rather than loosely stitched-together offerings from separate writers.

It's a no-frills sound, but dynamically expressive enough to make a potent virtue of the live feel ethos that characterises Total Dive. The lap steel riff to “Sorrow Reigns” is meaty enough to chew on, while the mid-tempo travails of “Comeback Loading” (enriched by Emma Tovell's pedal steel) positively sparkle in a way-past-midnight-in-a-dive-bar manner and the (relatively speaking) jaunty riff exchanges of “Twisters” (applying the most appropriate term here) rock. Elsewhere, the foreboding slow-burns crackle of closer “Watching Something Burn Up” hovers over its surroundings like dark clouds on the verge of offloading their icy load. Vocalist Patrick Turner's voice has the prerequisite cracks and tough edges to channel the protagonists of these frequently hard-luck tales, with a natural mournfulness that evokes the singer forever staring at departing taillights.

These are songs that are clearly inspired by American musicians and writers, but the lifelike, often haunting scenarios – malfunctioning vending machines, poems stored in a jar together with bones, climbing out of a van to rest on a tarpaulin, buildings being torn down with the pipework left hanging, brooding encounters at the edge of town, feelings of directionless malaise – tie Total Dive inextricably to the band's origins, rendering templates that could easily slide into derivative country rock cosplay into an album (and band) that feels genuinely authentic, fresh and singular.