THE DELINES
Mr Luck & Ms Doom (Love Police)
THERE'S SOMETHING TO SERENDIPITY, or coincidence, or maybe the universe being a whole lot smaller and more connected than we realise. Small enough, as Bobbie Gentry fan Willy Vlautin might tell you, to fit into a cheap motel room or a daytime drinking bar, connected like the prospect of failure and the consequences of it in someone built for more but too used to less to know it.
A couple of weeks ago I was immersed again in the songs of Bobbie Gentry, songs which at their best made detail delicious, minor lives significant, and soul music and country music, church music and bar music, inseparable. Such stories. The girl pimped out by her mother to feed the family, who goes on to run a life of control and strength beyond the ken of those who trashed her growing up. The family bickering ferociously but tied closely. The bitter weeds and even more bitter tears, the checkered feedsack dress and the tambourine and tape machine and clippings from a magazine.
Moving almost immediately from this Gentry-fest to the world of The Delines, 50 years on and set in and beyond the deep South, turned out to be a journey of no distance at all. Not least in the tale of Nancy & The Pensacola Pimp: its rhythm sultry-with-an-edge, its characters living on that edge, its sounds nighttime bar opening to a punchier hall, its inevitability some noir feeding into film more modern, more vicious.
Or maybe the woman remembering her teen lover, Ponyboy, who was “skinny as a pole … he always told corny jokes and would hold her hand wherever they go”. They hit the road and the tracks, swimming naked in the river during a thunderstorm, lose a finger and a baby at a west Texas ranch, and vibrate with something of the ache of the big sky guitar that carries us through an end that is inevitable but no less crushing for that.
The songs sung by Amy Boone, written by Willy Vlautin and played by Cory Gray (horns and keyboards), Sean Oldham (drums) Freddy Trujillo (bass), and Vlautin (guitar), exist in much the same Gentry environment of regular lives lived in supposed plainness but told in poetry, of emotions checked but impossible to suppress, of songs with soul as the foundation, no matter what is built on top.
Unlike Gentry, there aren’t going to be some bouncier grooves and the occasional light-hearted frolic from this Portland bunch, though Maureen’s Gone Missing eases its way to your hips and Left Hook Like Frazier moves on up in a way that puts you nearer 110th Street than Beale Street. But for those familiar with The Delines there is something of a change here, or a broadening of something begun on their last album: hope. Their characters are hardly in clover, but not everything and not everyone begins and ends in bleak light. Hell, there’s even a song where people who deserve love, get love, and it isn’t necessarily going to be taken away anytime soon.
That song is the title track and opening number, its protagonists a housecleaner in St Augustine, Florida, living in her car, and an ex-con fresh from a four-year stint he landed after committing his first crime. Neither has a history of successful relationships – “they always get out before it falls through” – but this time, “they got to talking and they swept each other off their feet”. As the organ and drums shuffle through the night, trumpet points skyward and Boone just lightly lands on the words. They might just make it you know. Why the hell not?
Vlautin’s songs, like his characters, work in shades of understatement, and he is served superbly by a band which is as happy to suggest the point as make it: the arrangements never exceed their capacity, yet they fill the spaces, whether it is the fading piano in The Haunting Thoughts and tempered organ and brass in JP & Me, or a just-so snare tap in the refusing-to-crumble Sitting On The Curb (as in “sitting on the curb, watching our house burn down”).
But best of all is Boone who inhabits each story such as to make it all conversational, almost hiding the fact she is a singer who gets behind your defences and lays waste to them while you’re looking the other way. Almost. I am not sure anyone can hide from the punctures that come in the low sky and unsteady ground of There’s Nothing Down The Highway. I’m damn sure everyone can recognise its origins. It’s a small world after all.
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