By Jim Rowland
Jay Buchanan has been treading the boards and making great music with Rival Sons for 17 years now, and as that band’s star has risen over that time, so too has Buchanan’s reputation as one of the best voices and frontmen of the modern rock era. Now Buchanan adds another string to his bow with ‘Weapons of Beauty’, his first solo album.
The album was conceived and written during a period Buchanan spent living in an underground bunker deep in the Mojave Desert near the mouth of an abandoned gold mine, and perhaps not too surprisingly given that, it has a distinct flavour of Americana largely removed from the harder rock of Rival Sons.
Recorded with long-term collaborator and producer Dave Cobb, and using a small ensemble of Nashville’s finest musicians, the ten tracks that make up ‘Weapons of Beauty’ are hugely impressive.
Last year Buchanan appeared in the acclaimed ‘Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere’ biopic, and features on three tracks from the film’s soundtrack. The film’s director Scott Cooper went on to sequence ‘Weapons of Beauty’ to enhance the album’s narrative flow and cinematic pacing which certainly seems to have been an effective and clever move here.
The rousing acoustic-flavoured ballad of ‘Caroline’ starts the album off in superb fashion, featuring the Americana/country twang that characterises much of the album. ‘Tumbleweeds’ follows similar lines, has a hint of Springsteen to it, and highlights the immense power that Jay Buchanan can unleash in his vocal delivery. ‘High and Lonesome’ adds a whole lot of soul into the mix, with ‘True Black’ having a gospel feel to it too.
Elsewhere, the delicate balladry of ‘Shower of Roses’ and the soaring ‘Sway’ have a dreamy beauty to them, the more up-tempo ‘Deep Swimming’ reminds me a bit of the more recent Americana-influenced material Robert Plant has produced and the rock edge of ‘The Great Divide’ is slightly reminiscent of classic-era Fleetwood Mac. There’s also a quite radical re-interpretation of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Dance Me to the End of Love’, moving it into a Paul Rodgers-style soulful rock direction.
For me, the best is saved ‘til last with the superb title track ‘Weapons of Beauty’, a piano ballad that is dramatic, powerful, dark and epic all at the same time, a finely crafted song, as are all of the songs here, and a prime example of the immense vocal talent Jay Buchanan possesses.
‘Weapons of Beauty’ is recognisable as a piece of work from Jay Buchanan the Rival Sons frontman, but at the same time exposes another side to him we may not have heard before to this extent. Considering this is a debut solo venture, this really is an exceptional piece of work.
- ‘Weapons Of Beauty‘ will be released on Friday (6 February).
- All written content © Über Röck 2026.