AMG Review of Amerasia: A Film by Wolf-Eckart Buhler

Stewart Mason
All Music Guide

Probably the most atypical release of Terry Allen's career, Amerasia is the soundtrack to a little-seen 1987 film by the European documentary maker Wolf-Eckart Buhler about American soldiers who stayed in Southeast Asia after the Vietnam War. To record the album, Allen traveled to Cambodia and recorded with a local rock band called Caravan (not, obviously, the English progressive rockers of the same name), both in the studio and at a live gig deep in the Thai jungle. Allen then took these tapes back to his usual stomping grounds of Lubbock, TX, and mixed them with new material recorded with his own Panhandle Mystery Band, featuring Lloyd Maines and Don Caldwell. The mixture of Southeast and Southwest is a little uneasy and the two sets of songs don't really mesh together very well, but that seems to at least be partially by design. As on most of Allen's albums, there's a dry but biting humor to songs like "Display Woman/Displaced Man" and "Lucy's Tiger Den." Amerasia is a flawed but ultimately successful experiment.