These United States surrender themselves to unbridled rock and roll exuberance: ringing guitars, thundering drums, desperate yearning bordering on hope. By turns larger-than-life and disarmingly intimate, this is folk in the truest sense – a record of the moment, of the cultural and emotional forces that animate everyday existence somewhere down below the headlines. (But never apart from them.) And These United States play it the way folk was meant to be played: hard, fast, big, slow, long, loud, loose, at last unburdened. They play like they mean it.