Our latest Short Cuts, a monthly feature where AUK casts a brief eye and ear on several albums we’ve received recently which just didn’t make the cut for a full review. Like most major music websites we can’t mention every album we get sent but we reckon the picks below deserve a nod. Click on the links to hear a song.
We kick off this latest round-up with a visit to Nottingham to hear Cold Hands’ debut album “The Lonesome Valley”. Described as being inspired by “Texas troubadours Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, the bruised orchestral ballads of Tindersticks and the warm kitchen sink melodramas of Richard Hawley,” we’d add Gene Clark to that list, partly due to Cold Hands’ deeply melancholic voice and partly due to the best song here, ‘Asleep At The Wheel (Of Time)‘ which shares some of Clark’s Zen like mystery. The yearning ‘A Cowboy Dreams Of Home’ was also a contender for best song but it’s fine wearied delivery was somewhat spoiled by a ferocious electric guitar wig out towards its end. It spoils the overall mood which is dark and somewhat sombre, the songs pretty much doing what it says on the publicity blurb can.
Oregon’s Nick Gamer sticks to his home state on “Oregoner”, a very pleasant collection of folky Americana songs with oodles of pedal steel and some cosmic country touches. ‘Close To The Sun’ hymns his home state with some fine harmony singing adding a soulful touch over the creamy steel guitar while opening song ‘So Far Gone‘ has a fine hint of John Prine in it as it casually strolls through the tale of a barfly who, after a long working day, retires to the bar to “to bury these memories beneath the good times and the lies.” While most of the songs are pretty much low key Gamer and his fine band do whip up a storm on the latter part of ‘Empty Quarter’. You get the sense that this is an outfit who would be great to see live.
There’s also some cosmic country embedded within Michael Reynolds’ latest release, “Tarnished Nickel Sky”. Reynolds recalls the heyday of LA Canyon country rock and the singer songwriters who infested those hills back then. There are elements of Poco and Michael Martin Murphy in the grooves and, it has to be said, Reynolds thrives in this element. ‘Take Me Down’ is a supremely sweet song, replete with gliding pedal steel and a robust rhythm section gently pushing the song along while ‘26 Horses‘ is quite sublime in its psychedelic cowboy delivery. Sure enough, there’s an element of nostalgia at play here for listeners of a certain age but Reynolds certainly evokes more innocent times and memories of a whole load of albums released on Asylum Records.
Anyone who longs for early days Drive By Truckers should head in the direction of Atomic Junction, a St. Louis based outfit who specialise in grungy guitar driven hangdog tales on their album ‘Peacedale’. Singer and songwriter for the band, Aaron Perlut, gives a fine heft to the songs with his gritty delivery, none more so than on the splenetic ‘My Life’s A Bitch’ were he rants about his pal who stole his gal. Romantic woes continue on the extraordinary ‘Now She Is My Ex’ where Perlut fails to heed the warning contained in a Loretta Lynn song, ‘Don’t Come Home A Drinking (With Lovin’ On Your Mind)’ and pretty much goes on to do so, the chorus going “Miss Loretta said no drinking and coming home for sex, but that’s just what I did and now she is my ex”. Elsewhere there’s imagined biography of the ex owner of a fine hat on the Lynyrd Skynyrd like ‘Gene The Auctioneer’ while they whip up quite a squall on ‘Devil Drives A Prius’. ‘Pretty Girls And Pins‘ meanwhile is a brilliant description of a man whose favourite dives are churches and strip clubs, the dichotomies of the American south writ large as the band rumble on quite excellently.
On “Everything Must Go”, Donal Hinely sits quite comfortably in the well worn seat of respectable acts who roam around the roots scene. There’s nothing to fault on the album but overall it’s unlikely to set the airwaves alight. Hinely and his band hit a fine bluesy groove when they weigh into ‘On A Roll‘, a song which recalls the likes of Rocking Jimmy And The Brothers Of The Night and there’s a brace of more laid back songs such as the Appalachian lilt of ‘High On The Mountain’ and the folky meditation which is ‘The Bondi Blues’.
Proving that you don’t have to be American to play americana, from Finland we find Buko Shane who have an album, “Pandemic Blues”, inspired (if that is the word) by the covid worldwide lockdown. It’s a muted listen, primarily acoustic with delicate filigrees of electric guitar and keyboards adding atmosphere. Singer and songwriter Heikki Hänninen delves into the introspection felt by many during this imposed period of isolation and translates it into a set of fine songs which question the idea of family, love and identity. The reluctant leaver of a relationship on ‘I Should Let You Go’ is despairing but that’s nothing to the pain contained in the devastating ‘Long Winter‘ while ‘My Old Companion’ reminds one of Leonard Cohen. To cap it all, there’s a version of ‘See That My Grave Is Kept Clean’ which has that sense of southern dread encapsulated by the likes of 16 Horsepower.
