Hop trains to high tail it to the rough terrains out west and you’ll get the good, the bad, and the ugly. Classic westerns never seem to suffice without that menacing three-word love triangle, and likewise, Gainesville’s indie-rock gunslingers Hot Water Music have braved the scalding horizon sun to bring in the Fire, the Steel, and the Tread EP as bullet bait.

In a vocal balancing act of Chuck Ragan’s spitting gravel and Chris Wollard’s spewing sensitivities, the two-song EP pulls the insightful wayfarer of The New What Next out of the mucky rivers of Caution’s raw emotion. Carrying the EP’s namesake, Ragan clears the gun smoke to a rustic opening track with the blue collar attitude of the countryside, as aging lines map themselves across grease- tainted hands, faces, and foreheads. “Hang on, hang on, gonna beat that wind before long” he cries, buddying up to electric twangs over shrill leads, and one can only imagine his fingers tracing the bottom of an empty whiskey bottle. And spinning a Bruce Springsteen record on repeat.

“Up To Nothing” has Wollard single-handedly clutching the reins with a grandfather wisdom tale in the other when self-realizations peak in a highly sentimental chorus: “Somehow it all adds up to nothing // somehow answers never really fit”. It rings with the bells of personal solitude that one can connect to in a dark, empty room.

Revive the pulse of an alternative rock genre struggling on forgotten glory days? Steel guitars and lonesome bars? Check and check. Everything dies, baby, and that’s a fact. But maybe everything that dies someday comes back, or so says The Boss. Hot Water Music once again wrestles their way through the thick of the proverbial tumbleweed in a way that chalks up both folklore ingenuity and rock sensibilities to simple but somewhat entertaining heights.

★★★.5/★★★★

*This review was composed by Dre Okorley