Even during their “ heyday ,” and even among their contemporaneous peers in the late 1980s and early ’90s, Souled American seemed shrouded in mystery. “I’d like to say I saw them play a lot,” Jeff Tweedy , whose band Uncle Tupelo traversed the same Midwestern clubs and watering holes, recalled in his book World Within a Song , “but owing to their habit of playing in near-total darkness, I’m not sure I ever really ‘saw’ them at all.” Soft-spoken, press-shy, and signed to a British label too busy hurtling toward bankruptcy to give them much support, Souled American entranced a cult of diehards but otherwise fell through the cracks. There are influential bands that spawn hundreds of soundalikes and then there are influential bands that spawn surprisingly few, not because their influence didn’t resonate but because their sound was so distinct, nobody quite knew how to emulate it. Souled American reside in that rarefied latter category.…