Ken Woods and The Old Blue Tunes Gang unveil "Silent Spike"

When Ken Woods and The Old Blue Gang put out an album, "Silent Spike," it isn't so much an album as it's the sound of the four horse riders of the Apocalypse rolling up with leather and tea coming for your soul. This seven-track, hourlong concept album is a spiritually stirring homage to the unheralded "Railroad Chinese," whose blood, sweat, and tenacity-thickened tears made possible the first transcontinental railroad across the United States. Standing a little over an hour, "Silent Spike" is a slow burn of a video worth every second. It is a call to wake up, a quintessentially American story that is told in quintessentially American music.

"Silent Spike" doesn't cut so much as slice across the American roots spectrum, from hurting ballads to arm-waving folk-rock, from back-porch blues to gospel-tinged laments. Each song is a chapter, each note a nail driven into the rails of memory. Songs like "Sundown Town," a chilling reflection on fear and survival, and "Ride the Rails," a soaring anthem that speaks to hope and survival, highlight the tension between this album's ability to inform and inspire.

Grand in scale and cathartic in texture, "Silent Spike" unfolds as a movie-length journey that engages with the immigrant saga, from the harrowing crossing to America, through the monstrous stench of laying track, to the backstabbing and whirlwind of arrival. It's a saga long since buried by history, and one now creaking to life with the distinctive American howl of the band. Ken Woods' rouged, thorn-covered voice and the band's careworn, dingy-road instrumentation bring each scene to life. The Old Blue Gang is not after comfort, commercial, or anything else; it is after truth, and they are smacking it in the kisser.

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