Flynnville Train "Sandman" (2010)

Album: Redemption
Label: Next Evolution Records


I'd been hearing this droning FM staple by America since the early '70s, but managed to ignore it until these super-scraggly Indiana longhairs turned it into the hardest rocking track I've heard so far this decade.

They're a country band, hypothetically (their 2007 debut came out on Toby Keith's Show Dog Nashville imprint), but they're country in the road-tested Kentucky Headhunters real-band sense, and this cut packs at least as high-decibel a wallop as the Headhunters' 2005 take on "Big Boss Man.”

Total biker jam, exploratory in a Skynyrd sense, with quiet spans and sitar from one Bret Shankar letting rhythm and lead guitars build over monster drums. My colleague George Smith informs me that cover bands frequently handled “Sandman” as “a fuzztone proto-metal dirge around '70-'72.

It was basically a simple dirge all along, so you could hammer the shit out of it” Amazing if it took 40 years for anyone to finally get that idea recorded, but that's pretty much what Flynnville do: Dirge into raveup, at least. (Second most menacing stab at the sound on their 2010 Redemption album: "Friend Of Sinners," about asking Christ's forgiveness since you've flubbed all the commandments.)

Anyway, turns out their big inspiration for pummelling the living dickens out of “Sandman” was 9-11: “We prepared ourselves mentally by watching footage of the attack and printing pictures of Bin Laden and placing them all around us in the studio,” their press bio reveals.

So when Brian Flynn shouts all that cryptic stuff about grounded planes and enlistment and “running from the man who goes by the name of the Sandman,” that's what they have in mind.

America "two American ex-pats and a Brit who first met on a U.S Air Force base, allegedly writing about a squadron based in France "had no idea what they were forecasting.