There are bands that symbolize something almost more powerful than themselves. One of these is Cracker, the American group from Ritchmond, in the state of Virginia, led by singer David Lowery and guitarist Johnny Hickman. Being one of those emblems of North American identity, the group represents the archetype of an alternative rock band at the highest level, a combo full of Yankee blood with an authentic attitude of resistance and struggle. Because listening to Cracker is like driving on a wide and infinite highway with the wind blowing in the right direction and in search of an identity free from work constraints and perhaps from some vital stupidity.
Emerging in the nineties from the ashes of Camper Van Beethoven, another very interesting group that deserves all the recognition, Cracker is the great project of a talented and not at all complacent-looking guy like David Lowery, a composer who describes reality – and sings it with that raspy voice – as if they were photographs of Robert Frank passed through a contemporary filter. His lyrics, accompanied by those big guitars typical of a great school of Southern rock, are like observing the North American landscape made up of street corners, coffee shops and gas stations that no one notices.
Cracker is an essential band of the well-known American label. The term Americana was born in the early 1990s. The magazine Not depression, which took its name from a song by the group Uncle Tupelo and emerged in 1995, began using it in some of his reviews and articles to define an unwritten genre that had existed since the previous decade. Specifically, it came from that varied and exciting musical movement which in Spain was called New American Rock, but which in the United States had different terms such as alternative country, cow punk, roots rock, desert rock… The music of the roots, the well-known one roots music in the USA, with the unbridled nerve of rock. Folk, country or bluegrass passed through the electric filter.
For as long as the term Americana has existed, in the mid-nineties, Crackers have emerged as one of its best pillars and, surely, without them Americana would not have made the leap to recognition so clearly and quickly. A label that seems designed specifically for them. The band’s personality is so charming that, at times, it seems like they play in more than one field. Sometimes they sound like folk-rock in the purest Neil Young style, other times they resemble the southern rock of Lynyrd Skynyrd, still others they are in the wake of alternative country like The Long Ryders or Green On Red and not infrequently they wear the classic Flying Burrito Brothers outfit. Good proof of this crossover of sounds can be found in the group’s latest album, Bring yourself down (2025), a live show that includes several performances from the early 1990s to today and serves as a magnificent X-ray of the band.
Somehow, there is in Cracker a wounded pride in his own vision of the United States, a country always in contradiction, full of nuances, with many miseries as pillars. On albums like Kerosene hat, Greenland OR From Berkeley to Bakersfield You get that bittersweet feeling about a society with cracks. With impetus or melancholy, their songs unfold as if Sean Baker’s cinematic gaze, focused on the marginal, met the spirit of Gram Parsons, as divine as it is cursed.
Cracker is on tour in Spain. The group plays in Barcelona, Bilbao, Zaragoza, Vigo, Seville, Madrid and Valencia. Maybe it’s the last chance to see them live in our country. A great opportunity to understand why Cracker is the pure force of great Americana, that unwritten and exciting genre that illustrates the vast and diverse United States.
