A.A. Bondy has taken his own sweet time to settle into his bones and create music that permeates purely. His somewhat ‘lost’ debut offering American Hearts was released on tiny indie Superphonic in 2007, landing him a network television debut on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, garnering significant attention from the critics including NPR (“a real talent for hard-bitten blues-folk music… as well as an impressive arsenal of sneakily grabby guitar lines”), Popmatters (“sparse yet effective, powerful and poignant”) and Pitchfork (“...an unfolding tableau... described with a troubadour’s guitar and an obsessive's mastery of form and musical history). Bondy was also recently highlighted on Spin.com as one of “10 Must-Hear Acts at Sasquatch Fest”.

With reputation building, Bondy was taken in and nurtured by the Fat Possum label (US home to Andrew Bird) who saw the kernel in that lo fi beginning, allowing Bondy to mosey along at a gentle pace, picking up a legion of fans – the likes of Bon Iver, Felice Brothers, Low Anthem and Conor Oberst – along the way, as he plays things the only way he knows how – raw from the guts, and deep into his expansive heart.

Auguste Arthur Bondy’s musical journey could be seen as circuitous, but he has seemingly found his zenith. Born in New Roads, Louisiana (close to Baton Rouge and a stone’s throw from New Orleans) Bondy was part of the band Verbena, their talents attracting producers like Dave Fridmann and Dave Grohl before they finally called it a day. On disbanding, Bondy regrouped with himself in the Catskills to produce the American Hearts record, free from band scriptures and many headed burdens.

March 2009 brought about the beginnings of When the Devil's Loose. Firstly, upstate New York with snow on the ground, before heading to Water Valley, Mississippi, where the album was finally assembled. As Bondy explains, it was a sublime choice of locations.
“The days grew longer and the snakes began to wake up. I ate catfish and walked around a lot. We got a lot of rain and the weeds grew at an alarming rate. We finished work one night under a red moon”.

Ultimately Bondy describes the experience of moving to that part of the world and the culmination of the record as “sometimes it feels like standing in a wonderful light and other times it's like a crime scene. Or like laying drunk in the grass and watching the moon come in and out of the clouds”.

When the Devil’s Loose is all about the stirring that happens when Bondy opens his mouth. The voice seems to say that the water is fine, but it’s hard to say for sure. He expands on the sparseness of his debut with a full band now accompanying him on most tracks, lending a full, roomy sound to the 10 haunting songs.

Ranging from the ghostly rattle of the title track, through the elegiac waltz of ‘A Slow Parade’ to the Stax spook of ‘To The Morning’ and the lonely twang of ‘Oh The Vampyre’ (“You know I could drink the whole world and never get my fill”) all the way up to the sweaty and feverish high point, ‘False River’.

It is a record that is sure to establish A.A. Bondy on a musical map way beyond Louisiana.