Asheville, North Carolina is most often portrayed as an American utopia, an oasis of indie culture, artistic enclave, gorgeous nature trails and top-notch cuisine—Austin if it was kept weird, a less overexposed Athens, a less antebellum Oxford. But judging from Muscle & Bone's "Song for the Broken Road", the quartet's hometown is subject to the same kind of mundane and crushing despair as any other smallish city in the south. Over the kind of 1990s collegiate jangle that was prevalent about three hours east in Chapel Hill, Rob Travis moans, "I will die before I’m old because I want to...I’ll be crushed beneath the weight of all the empties/ They will sit forever on my chest." Because it's Asheville, maybe they'll be limited run microbrews, but all the same, Muscle & Bone self-describe their music as "sad jams" and "emo survival" and on "Song for the Broken Road", the former seems necessary for the latter.