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Euphoria Station — Smoking Gun
(Bandcamp Reverie Suite RSR-005, 2025, CD / DL)

by Peter Thelen, Published 2025-09-11

Smoking Gun Cover art

Euphoria Station is a Los Angeles based band built around the core duo of singer and lyricist Saskia Kraft van Ermel and guitarist, mandolinist, banjoist, and songwriter Hoyt Binder, with additional musicians and singers rounding out the band. Their story began back in 2007 with the release of the album One Heart, credited simply to Saskia, though Binder and other musicians were involved. For whatever reason, the album was released again in 2017 with new cover art as Euphoria Station’s debut album One Heart. In 2019 Euphoria Station, with mostly a different crew of musicians released their second album, The Reverie Suite, a minor masterpiece that showed a band defining a new sound that was clearly their own — a masterful hybrid of Americana, Southern rock and outstanding songcraft informed by elements of jazz, folk, and progressive rock. Smoking Gun is the band’s third album, one that takes their sound one step further using many of the same players from their previous album: Ronald Van Deurzen on piano and Hammond B-3, Rebecca Kleinmann on flute, and Tollak Ollestad on Harmonica, along with newcomers Toss Panos on drums (who’s played with Mike Keneally, Robben Ford, Kevin Gilbert, and many others) and bassist Jorgen Carlsson (Gov’t Mule and others). The album launches with a beautiful acoustic instrumental cover of the traditional “Amazing Grace (In Memory of...)” featuring Binder on slide dobro, and then seamlessly jumps to a rocking cover of The Marshall Tucker Band’s “Take the Highway,” introducing Saskia’s vocals after a superb instrumental intro. This almost seven-minute version provides plenty of room for the players to stretch out, where Binder turns in a brilliant solo. And that’s the last of the cover tunes — from here on out all the songs are written by Binder and van Ermel, and they underscore the band’s Southern rock meets progressive Americana style. The title track is up next, with an intro on dobro and Saskia’s voice occupying a slightly lower register with harmonies as the band rocks all around her. Other standouts include “Carolina on My Mind,” the Allmans-reminiscent instrumental powerhouse “Dusty Roads”; the thoughtful “Here with You” offers some of Saskia’s most heartfelt lyrics, while the harmonica intro to “Nowhere Junction” takes the listener down to a bluesy railroad junction until Saskia and the band come in and take the song to someplace new. Try “Off the Beaten Path” for some subtle odd-meter proggy play with hooks galore, or “My Mistake,” a song that will play in your head for days. In all, Smoking Gun features thirteen outstanding songs total for a little over an hour playing time.

Filed under: New releases, 2025 releases

Related artist(s): Toss Panos, Euphoria Station

More info
http://euphoriastation.bandcamp.com/album/smoking-gun

 

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