With its forthright examination of personal issues, lead single ‘7UP’ gives a glimpse into the record. The rhythm is peppy and the sound bright, but below this surface lies something more conflicted. As though the fun exterior holds a darker truth. “If you listen closely, this song is full of contradictions,” Khamvanthong explains:

The song follows me through ups and downs of getting a hold of my relationship with alcohol. When I was struggling with my relationship with alcohol, I found myself lying and trying to find loopholes in my attempted sobriety at the time. I was constantly in a battle of needing people around me while pushing them away whenever they checked me for my behaviour and relapse and trying to salvage those relationships through bargaining and making excuses.”

The result functions as both a candid self-examination and a promise to get better. A lesson in the value of honesty in the face of pain. A commitment to confronting the sides of ourselves we’d prefer to leave behind.

You can believe me I wanna get better
You don’t have to leave
It’s been a good week
I can have fun without holding a drink

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Now recording as Doc Feldman & the Alt + Cntry + Delete, Feldman returned this spring with a brand new record, A Healthy Dose of Anxiety, on Shaker Steps Records. With more of a full band set up, the album sees a continuation of the inventive spirit that marked the debut, further developing the dark Americana sound by branching out into psych and seventies rock. The result is something far richer but no less evocative, a sound capable of presenting sadness, bitterness and love in one heady hit.

Take ‘Screwed’, its sleek and sinuous retro tones offering a real counterpoint to Feldman’s distinctively brooding vocals, a deceptively laidback shuffle over which his vocals emerge impassioned and caustic. “Ain’t it just like life to put the screws to you?” goes the opening line, “As if you aren’t already screwed? / I’m still trying to find that line between losing my shirt and losing my mind.” This is the mood of A Healthy Dose of Anxiety. A piercing sorrow with the way things are, a tangible fury that it was allowed to ever be. A deep desire for action yet a nagging inability to enact change. This is typified by ‘Heavy Edges’, which sets its sights on directly on whatever stage of capitalism we’re calling this now.

Of course your left hand don’t know what your rights been doing
Who’d want to see such feats of inequality?
So don’t pretend to want to deliver on your promises of deliverance
when all you do is keep feeding the machine

But where there is feeling, there is still hope. The bluesy swagger of ‘Receiving (for Rollo May)’ passes through desperation and loneliness via dogged determination, while folk rock hymn ‘Help Never Comes from Above’ reworks the cynicism of the title into a celebration of other possibilities. Progressing with what might at first seem like pessimism, decrying magic spells and empty prayers, the song repurposes such disillusionment into human solidarity. Clasping hands not in plea to God but to pull another out of the shit. If we have control over anything, it is what happens here around us. “Help never comes from above,” Feldman sings, “and if it does give thanks for the grace of earthly love.”

For all of the record’s dissatisfaction, Doc Feldman repeatedly finds this other side of the deal. Not an answer as such, but at least a direction in which to channel one’s energies. Be it the wistful warmth of piano-led ‘San Antonio Missions’ or the bright rhythm of ‘Straight Talk / Fully Wired’, A Healthy Dose of Anxiety transcends the bleak world in which it lives through sheer grit and determination. Succumbing not to easy fantasies but the call of hard, imperfect work. A willingness to stare down the worst of things, find motivation there. “I’m just hoping the pain can be a driving force,” he sings on the latter. “For our solutions to find their course.”

A Healthy Dose of Anxiety is out now and available from the Doc Feldman & the Alt + Cntry + Delete Bandcamp page.

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The band utilize an odd brew of instruments, including the standard fare of guitar, piano bass and percussion, as well as cello, flute, harmonica, mandolin and even circus organ. Opener ‘Redbird’ is an instrumental track which reminded me of JBM but then ‘Big Chief,’ another instrumental, uses flutes to invoke mystical-desert images, and while I’m no expert on Native American music (so this might be a pop culture-induced error), we get the most explicit shamanistic vibes of spirits inhabiting bright star-filled skies and hard flat plains filled with scrub and birds and visions.

Other standouts include ‘Infestation’, a dark and rollicking number supported by stuttering cello and wild harmonica, ‘Blood in Common,’ another finger-snapping rock track and ‘Sevens’, which a far more gentle, pastoral folk song.

There’s a strange something that runs through these tracks, and to ignore this something is to miss what makes the album so distinctive. This something is not entirely earthly but neither is it extraterrestrial. It’s more about that feeling of profound mystery we feel when looking into space or considering existence beyond our own experience of it. It’s to do with our relationship with the moon and the stars before we started measuring them and visiting them and giving them numerical codes as names. It’s an album about unanswerable questions. This is captured perfectly on the final track, ‘All You Celestials’, with its lyrics of :

“Didn’t you see how the moon split the sky
and poured out it’s cold light on hollow dark nights?
And all you celestials in orbit display
a circular pattern of waxing and wane.”

You can buy the album now on CD, Vinyl or digital download via Bandcamp.

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