By: Ben Salvo
Rating: 9/11

Americana might not be an easy thing to sophisticate, but Motel Motel, the Brooklyn-based cowboy rockers, have smartly navigated the miscellany and found a niche somewhere between Modest Mouse and Merle Haggard that suits them perfectly. On their album, New Denver, strings, piano, drums and vocals bend and swell at the exact right moments, and yet the overall sound manages to maintain a brash lo-fi ugliness, offering a testament to each member’s own well-honed musical ability.

It wouldn’t be hard to fill two summer crush mix tapes on both sides with the multitude of rock, country and pop artists Motel Motel channel through their deliberate twang and tin can melodies. The many musical influences aside, they definitely bring something legitimate and brand new to the table.

No song in recent years is as simultaneously cheery and existential as the album’s opener, “Harlem.” Scratchy epic (and current crowd favorite), “Coffee,” recounts love lost in its own complexity and the true frustration of the modern Westward soul with skillfully metered lyrics and mellow instrumentation. “Virginia” starts with a wine-soaked guitar intro and dreamy vocal prologue but picks up swiftly and without warning into a juicy, lightly aggressive section before swimming back into an airy symphony of generous chords and almost mumbled words. This song and two others clock in past the seven-minute mark, and only three of the songs on the 13 track album are under five minutes. Thankfully, these guys have the chops to make every second count.

A group as consistently talented as Motel Motel gains a lot of indie respect quickly, and they truly have a solid following, but they’ll find a lot of would-be fans crying out for a new album faster then they might expect. With all of its merits, New Denver is not accessible enough to mainstream rock and alt-country audiences, but something tells me that the band isn’t losing any sleep over it.