thedailytimes.com : Your 24/7 news source

The guys in The Hotshot Freight Train want to celebrate their spirituality, not beat you over the head with it.

They don’t shy away from addressing faith and weighty topics in the songs on their new album, “The Devil Pays in Counterfeit.” But they’re not trying to save souls from the stage, either.

“We have all matured in our faith and spirituality, and those things definitely plays a role, but the whole purpose of the lyrics is hopefully not necessarily a spiritual feeling to every song or an awakening, but something that speaks to people to some extent,” bassist/singer Josh Tipton told The Daily Times this week. “We want everybody to have fun, and we want them to enjoy the show and keep things light-hearted ourselves. We’re not up there groaning and being all like, ‘Woe is me.’

“Hopefully, people can identify with what we talk about and realize that it’s about the state of humanity and how, when things get tough, do you keep going or just give up. The moral of the story for us is that you keep going. You might take one on the chin every once in a while, but overall, life is good. You struggle through the bad times, and you just keep going.”

The Hotshot Freight Train has kept going for almost three years now, when Tipton was joined in the project by former bass player Mike Gentry on bass, guitarist Greg Barker, guitarist Josh Hutson and drummer Caleb Tipton. The members come from various local outfits — Joey’s Loss, Atropos and Atrium — and came together around a common sound that’s been compared to Superdrag, The Replacements, Hot Water Music, Guided By Voices and, most prominently, Fugazi.

On the band’s debut EP, “We Are The Hotshot Freight Train,” the urgency of the guitar playing, Tipton’s howling vocals and the driving backbeat provided by Tipton and Gentry all combined for a maelstrom of primal energy. There’s no nu-metal Panzer attack, no punk attitude, no pop bounce — just straight out rock ‘n’ roll that’s made the band popular at such venues as Old City Java.

On “The Devil Pays in Counterfeit,” the urgency and punk overtones have been toned down, but the guys rock just as hard. The album displays the maturity that the band has been through since Gentry left the fold, as well as the respect the guys have for a band like Wilco, which dares to experiment with shifting sounds and different musical directions from album to album.

“If we could say, ‘OK, this is who we want to be’ — if we could be one band for a day — absolutely the four of us would agree on a band like Wilco,” Tipton said. “Those guys have done so much and been through so much; they work through things at their own pace, and each album is a little bit different from the last. We would love to be compared to what they do, although I don’t think we’ll ever be as stripped down as their stuff.

“We’re just really into Americana, salt-of-the-earth rock ‘n’ roll. We love artists like Tom Waits and Bruce Springsteen, too — good songwriters who tell stories — and I think my songwriting has definitely grown. It’s become more of a group process than it has been before.”

Previously, Tipton said, he focused on lyrics and melodies, but with his bandmates responsible for instrumental duties, it was sometimes difficult to marry the two creative processes together. After Gentry left and Tipton took over on bass, the lineup began to gel in a way it hadn’t before, he added.

“We’ve always been the kind of group where, if we’re working on a song for a little while and we’re struggling with it, we’ll just say, ‘This isn’t working right now,’” he said. “Now, we’re a little bit more persistent. If something isn’t going well at the beginning, we don’t immediately scrap it like maybe we would have at one time. It’s helped us find more of a consistency in the songwriting and the way the songs sound.”

Part of the delay in the almost two years between “We Are The Hotshot Freight Train” and “The Devil Pays in Counterfeit” had to do with the remaining members regrouping after Gentry left. Tipton had to get back into playing an instrument, he said, and the members decided to focus solely on new material instead of revisiting songs that took Gentry to pull off.

“It took us a little bit longer than we expected to find our niche, and we decided that with Mike leaving, we wanted to just start from scratch,” Tipton said. “We didn’t keep any of the songs or material we played when he was with us. So it took a little bit of time to figure out what was best for us and how we wanted to sound.”

On “The Devil Pays in Counterfeit,” that sound is locked in. More importantly, it rises and crashes on waves of guitar, bass and drums that lift up Tipton’s lyrics, which focus in on emotions and observations that are more personal than the group’s previous songs.

“I think this record is quite a bit more personal, and there are things that kind of mill around in my head for whatever reason,” he said. “It’s hopefully a social commentary on what’s going on around us. It seems as we get older and see more, we understand the struggles that a lot of people are going through — we realize now how our parents struggled to make things work and to take care of our needs.

“You begin to see things as you get older, the things your parents tried to shield you from when you were younger, and those things become a lot more real to you.”