I was on the point of writing that this kind of album could only have been made by an American until I realised that JP Den Rex is actually Dutch.
He was born in Amsterdam in 1951 and on the album's cover photo he has a well weathered look of an outdoors type, the kind of guy you could easily imagine hitching his way across the U.S, of A.
He was once part of a Dutch Alt.Country band called Tortilla but since the late 1990s he has been primarily a solo artist.
His small backing band for this album includes Yvonne Ebbers on guitar, mandolin and vocals, an artist who also collaborated with him on his previous album Bad French in 2007 . On that album there is a song called American Tune, suggesting that it can be regarded as a companion piece to this latest record.
JP is currently based in New York working on a novel tracing the life of a romantic traveller in search the American dream and the songs here follow the same journey as his fictional creation.
The story charts a cut price road trip heading west to California. 'Love So Helpless' introduces the key themes of the story, told in part through unconvincing spoken word recollections.
After a scrape with a dishevelled Russian girl who tries to commit suicide, our hero spends a night in a prison cell in Tucson, is later down and out Phoenix and eventually ends up in San Francisco. Ultimately, he is none the wiser about what drives the American dream but at least he is more aware of his own issues. The album closes with the words "Once you are in tune with yourself, you are in tune with the band".
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JP's take on Americana includes a back-tracking into doo-wop on Vagabond Heart and a side turn into French chanson on Mon Desir Noir. The latter explains why the ugly genre label 'Europicana' has been dumped on him. It would, however, be more accurate to point to similarities with conventional MOR pop rather than branding him as an alternative country rocker.
The album has a nice mellow feel to it and at times he even sounds a little like David Byrne, particularly on the upbeat ballad When I'm Down. Lyrically, however, he's a far cry from the Talking Head with lines like "Only love can break my foolish pride" and "A desert strewn with broken dreams" not being original or dramatic enough to bring the story to life.
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