A set of songs which builds on their last album and extends the stories told there in new directions, coupled with a growing musical sophistication.
The Set Up is flagged as a companion piece to last year’s Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom, starting off from a tune Willy Vlautin brought in at the end of the sessions, Walking With His Sleeves Down. Vlautin says, “Amy learned it on piano, and we recorded it live. Her take was stunning, but the song didn’t quite fit with the record. It was lonelier, more rattled, and it missed that rudderless romance that inhabits the world of Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom, so we set it aside”
Stunning doesn’t begin to cover it. If you had a namecheck for Birmingham’s Judas Priest on your Delines lyric bingo card, you can tick it off on this song. Just Amy Boone and piano, bleak but beautiful. The next song that Vlautin brought to the band was The Meter Keeps Ticking, a companion song to JP and Me from Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom. A more up-tempo (at least in Delines’ world) song, piano and percussion drive the song at an almost funky pace. Vlautin says, “I brought in a version of The Reckless Life. The song worked sonically, but again, it didn’t feel quite right lyrically. There was a lonely desperation to it, and the other two tunes I just mentioned. I realized I was writing songs in the same world as Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom, but from a different angle. The three tracks pulled the listener into the lives of the drug-addled, the grifters, and the lost, and not the romantics adrift on the road like Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom.”
Lyrically, it is certainly bleak, but musically, in places, it is the Delines at their most soulful. The Reckless Life has an almost Bobby Womack-esque, poetic feel about it. Vlautin suggests that the writing for both this album and the previous one was inspired by “the residue of the opioid epidemic in the US.” Can You Get Me Out of Phoenix? is perhaps the key song of the album. “It’s a tune about a grifter’s daughter stranded in Phoenix who is thinking about the life of her father.” The 70s soul feel is present here, and the narrative talks about the lonely wreckage left after the breakup. The Set Up, short spoken-word pieces: the lure, the catch, and the grift, written by Vlautin and Cory Gray build on the character in Can You Get Me Out Of Phoenix?. Keep The Shades Down was, Vlautin says, “written as a link between the romance of Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom and the isolation of the The Set Up. The couple in the song realises just how close the haves are to being have-nots.” The Country Soul ballad is the first feature for Gray’s atmospheric Miles Davis-style trumpet, highlighting the fact that sonically, this is a step in a different direction for The Delines. More acoustic piano, more Saxophone on Keep The Shades Down and ensemble brass spread across the album.
The connections between songs continue with a series of instrumentals scattered across the record. Jumping Off In Madras was written for the woman in Her Ponyboy off the previous album and Cory wrote Getting Out Of The Ward for the guy in The Meter Keeps Ticking who is leaving the mental hospital two days after Christmas and the stunningly beautiful The Last Time I Saw Her for the kid in The Reckless Life as she sets off from the hospital into the darkness of the world.
It’s hardly a secret that we are quite keen on The Delines here at AUK. The high ratings for their albums and appearances at the top of “best of” lists imply that the quality of their work is consistently excellent. Willy Vlautin’s notes on The Set Up, which we have quoted from extensively here, also suggest that they are aware of building a set of songs and records which are woven together by the characters and themes he writes about. Over the last couple of albums, there has been a growing sophistication in the way Willy Vlautin writes, and in how The Delines interpret his stories, and this is another step forward in that process. Vlautin sums up the album saying: “By the time we finished the record, we realized The Set Up was the wayward, misguided, and lonely sister to Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom. More ragged and undone, but all CinemaScope Delines.” Lyrically, maybe, but musically, this album is another step towards refining the blend of country and soul which they have been building over the last 12 years, and may be their best yet.
