NEW ALBUMS
THE DELINES
The Delines: a knife-edge performance
Mr Luck & Ms Doom DECOR
9/10
Willy and Amy let a little light into the darkness on their finest album yet. By Stephen Troussé
PAOLO BRILLO; JASON QUIGLEY
“NOTHING good happens in a bar at night to a guy over 50. It’s just a fact,” an old soak named RJ tells Al, the narrator of Willy Vlautin’s seventh novel, The Horse. Al, an ageing songwriter, hiding out in an abandoned mine in central Nevada, takes the advice to heart and resolves to quit the bar life and spend his time listening to old jazz records and Ennio Morricone soundtracks and writing brooding folk ballads on his harmonium, songs with titles like “Nancy & The Pensacola Pimp”.
It’s one of a handful of songs that show up on Mr Luck & Ms Doom, The Delines’ sixth and finest album to date. Vlautin has always worked on the fertile borderlands or fault lines between fiction and song, and insists most of his novels are songs that somewhere along the way got a little out of hand. In fact, the last Delines album was a largely instrumental soundtrack to Vlautin’s novel The Night Always Comes (which in turn is soon to be a movie). But you’d have to reach for the likes of Bobbie Gentry’s Patchwork or Rickie Lee Jones’ Pirates, or indeed a film like Robert Altman’s Raymond Carver amalgam, Short Cuts, to find a world so rich and intimately strange.