A Journey Through the Dust, Darkness, and Hallucinations of the American Soul
Review by Jonathan Levitt https://www.instagram.com/elchingonphotography/
Some records you listen to. Others transport you somewhere else entirely. Sniffing Spirits, by Roger Kunkel and Stoo Odom, belongs to the latter category. Four tracks into this strange, immersive, and deeply cinematic journey, I find myself completely smitten. This is music that conjures landscapes, summons ghosts, and stares unflinchingly into the darker corners of the human condition. It’s the sound of a world coming apart, of lonely horizons and impending storms, of appetites that cannot be satisfied and truths that refuse to remain buried.
What makes this record so compelling is its refusal to settle into one place. It wanders between dusty Western soundscapes, hazy barroom romps, menacing guitar excursions, and hallucinatory explorations of a world teetering on the edge of collapse. There’s a roughness and unpredictability to it all that feels entirely intentional. Nothing is overly polished. Nothing feels safe. And that’s precisely the appeal.
The opening track, “The Sniffing Song,” sets the stage with a wonderfully off-kilter barroom romp. The guitar is hazy and distorted, sounding almost as though you’re listening to an old transistor radio tucked away in the corner of some forgotten saloon. The vocals evoke an old-timey band playing to a handful of weary patrons somewhere in the American West. There’s a looseness to the performance, a wonderfully ragged quality that gives the song its character.
And then there’s the dog sniffing your bamboo sheets. Because why the hell not?
The absurdity is part of the charm. Musically, I hear echoes of Calexico and that unmistakable Giant Sand sensibility: the dusty Southwestern atmosphere, the slightly psychedelic haze, the feeling that the music might wander off into some unexpected territory at any moment. It’s playful, strange, and full of personality. Kunkel and Odom open the record by inviting us into their world, and it’s a world where conventional boundaries don’t seem to matter very much.
Then comes “Smell,” which takes us somewhere considerably darker. Suddenly, we’re back in the Old West, but this isn’t the romanticized frontier of Hollywood nostalgia. This is the desolate, unforgiving landscape of Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Endless desert. Gunslingers somewhere on the horizon. Dust swirling across barren ground. The end of the Earth. Hell itself. And somewhere in the distance, the unmistakable feeling that a shootout is coming.
There’s something profoundly mournful about this track. The drone, the twang of the guitar lurking in the background, the cavernous echoes stretching into the distance: everything contributes to a feeling of almost unbearable isolation. I can picture myself standing alone in the desert, staring toward the horizon and realizing I still have hundreds of miles to go. No refuge. No destination in sight. Just the landscape, the elements, and my own thoughts.
Then the weather begins to turn. Thunderstorms dominate the landscape. You can almost smell the rain approaching, feel the pressure building in the air, and sense the world holding its breath. Every little noise becomes amplified. Every distant sound carries a question. Is it friend or foe?
This is cavernous music, not for the faint of heart. It pulls you inward, past the surface of things, into some deeper, darker part of yourself. “Smell” is absolutely cinematic glory, the kind of track that could accompany a fever dream of the American frontier, where every shadow holds a secret and every silence feels dangerous. I’d love to experience this music live. Something tells me that standing in a room while these sounds unfold around you would be an extraordinary experience.
With “You Gotta Feed,” Kunkel delivers some of the most expansive, emotionally charged guitar work on the record. There’s a menacing guitar line running through the song, and I absolutely love it. The playing opens up the landscape, stretches toward the horizon, and cuts straight through the darkness. There are moments when it recalls elements of the Ruby Sea, that sense of beauty emerging from something vast, mysterious, and a little dangerous.
Roger Kunkel is an extraordinary guitarist, and what gets me is his range. He can deliver the quietest, most intimate, almost folksy tunes, then seemingly out of nowhere unleash blistering guitar work through his Cloud Seeder project. He knows when to hold back and when to let it rip. There’s a depth to his playing that I find endlessly compelling, and Sniffing Spirits is giving him room to explore that full range.
“You Gotta Feed” also brings to mind Crime and the City Solution’s Paradise Discotheque, with its dark, brooding atmosphere and sense of impending reckoning. There’s something almost Bible Belt about this song, too: raw, stripped down, and unafraid to look a man directly in the eye and tell him the truth.
It makes me think of the five fingers going straight to the heart of a man, an image associated with Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter and Radio Raheem in Do the Right Thing. There’s no elaborate argument here, no bullshit, no hiding behind pretty words. Just the truth, delivered with enough force to leave a mark.
And then there are the lyrics:
“You feed off explosions, off of fireworks. You feed off anything that hurts. Love me like a lamprey, baby, suck upon my hide.”
Jesus Christ. Those lines are fucking incredible.
There’s something grotesque, intimate, and brutally honest about that imagery. The lamprey becomes a metaphor for a relationship built on consumption, for the kind of hunger that doesn’t simply want love but needs to feed on another person. Explosions, fireworks, pain: anything that produces a reaction, anything that keeps the machine running. It’s an image of an appetite that cannot distinguish between pleasure and destruction.
This is truth speaking deep truths. The music has the menace to match the words, but Kunkel’s guitar also gives it room to breathe, to expand into something almost beautiful. The darkness isn’t just darkness for its own sake. It illuminates something.
By the time we arrive at “Taste,” the fourth track, the record takes another unexpected turn. This is exploratory, unsettling music that feels as though it’s emerging from the wreckage of a world coming apart at the seams. Honestly, it might be the perfect soundtrack for the apocalyptic reality we’re living through in this country right now. Everything burning down. Everything being ravaged: the land, the people, the very foundations of what we thought we knew.
There’s a sense of collapse hanging over this song, as if we’re watching the whole damn thing unravel in slow motion.
But “Taste” isn’t simply an exercise in doom. It moves into a hallucinatory space, somewhere between consciousness and delirium, where familiar sounds become unfamiliar and you’re no longer entirely sure where the ground beneath your feet has gone. It feels like fingertips desperately clinging to the edge of something, holding on by the thinnest possible margin.
Things are simmering here. You can feel the tension building beneath the surface, the sense that something terrible might happen at any moment, but nothing quite explodes. Instead, the song leaves you suspended between anticipation and dread.
I keep thinking about cinema while listening to this track. If someone doesn’t pick up “Taste” and use it in a film soundtrack, they’re missing an enormous opportunity. I can absolutely imagine it in a Coen Brothers film, accompanying some bizarre, darkly comic sequence in which the world has gone completely sideways and the characters are stumbling toward an inevitable reckoning. I can hear it in a Jim Jarmusch movie, too, where the music becomes part of the landscape, a strange and beautiful presence that says more than dialogue ever could.
And then there’s the ghost of Neil Young’s Dead Man soundtrack hovering somewhere in the background. That same feeling of drifting through a haunted landscape, where time seems to have slowed down and the distinction between the real and the imagined begins to dissolve.
“Taste” doesn’t need to tell you what’s happening. It lets you feel it. It doesn’t rush toward a conclusion or offer the comfort of an easy resolution. It lets the tension breathe. It lets the darkness gather.
Four tracks into the unknown
What strikes me most about Sniffing Spirits is how completely it commits to atmosphere. These songs aren’t merely collections of melodies and lyrics; they’re environments. Each track opens a door into a different psychological landscape, and each one leaves you somewhere you weren’t expecting to go.
There’s the absurd, fuzzy charm of “The Sniffing Song.” The mournful desert isolation of “Smell.” The brutal emotional honesty and extraordinary guitar work of “You Gotta Feed.” And the hallucinatory dread of “Taste,” with its vision of a world slowly burning itself to the ground.
Across all four tracks, Kunkel’s guitar is a constant source of fascination, whether it’s twanging through a hazy saloon, echoing across an imaginary desert, cutting into the heart of a song, or contributing to an atmosphere of creeping unease. His ability to move between restraint and ferocity gives the record much of its emotional power. Odom’s presence alongside him helps make this musical landscape feel like a shared exploration rather than a predictable exercise in genre.
The reference points are there if you want them: Calexico, Giant Sand, Crime and the City Solution, Neil Young’s Dead Man. But the real achievement is how these influences illuminate the music without defining it. Sniffing Spirits inhabits a space of its own, somewhere between the American frontier, the haunted barroom, and the end of the world.
This is music that cuts through the bullshit. Music that understands the power of silence, distortion, menace, and a perfectly placed guitar line. Music that can make you laugh at the absurdity of a dog sniffing bamboo sheets one moment and leave you staring into the abyss the next.
It’s strange. It’s beautiful. It’s unsettling. And it feels alive.
Everything is simmering. The horizon is darkening. Somewhere, thunder is rolling across the desert.
And I can’t wait to hear what comes next for these guys.
5/5 stars
Check out their Bandcamp page here.