The playlist: Americana – Lucinda Williams, Elisa Ambrogio, the Lost Brothers and Mina Tindle
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Version 0 of 1. Lucinda Williams – Compassion One of my favourite Vic Chesnutt lyrics speaks of how the singer “Settled down on a hurt as big as Robert Mitchum/ And listened to Lucinda Williams” – it seems to capture that deep grain in Williams’s voice that suggests some profound understanding of pain. I don’t think I’ve ever heard that voice sound better than on the opening song of her new record – which you can listen to over on NPR – bare, save for an acoustic guitar, it stands somewhere between a creak and an ache to tell us of the importance of humanity and kindness. The effect is something akin to Leonard Cohen reading Faulkner. “You do not know what wars are going on,” she cautions, “down there, where the spirit meets the bone.” In the meantime, here’s another of the album’s tracks, Burning Bridges, which is her new single. Elisa Ambrogio – Superstitious You may be familiar with Ambrogio from her work with Magik Markers and 200 Years, but her solo outing, The Immoralist, shows another side again. Its 10 songs offering a kind of glazed-eyed pop, full of layered harmonies and tales of isolation and dismay, sung with all the pretty edges of her voice unravelling. This track particularly delights me; a drowsy girl group tribute with a surface shimmer that, like many of the songs on Ambrogio’s record, belies the sharpness of its lyrics: a young woman’s spiralled thoughts about her boyfriend. “I cross the path of black cats,” she sings with spacey sweetness, “to keep you loving me.” The Lost Brothers – Derridae The fourth album from Oisin Leech and Mark McCausland, New Songs of Dawn and Dust, was released this week. The pair are Irish, but wear their American influences – the Everly Brothers, Simon & Garfunkel, the Louvin Brothers, with a kind of warm ease. Richard Hawley has spoken of the tenderness of their singing, and that feels the most fitting way to describe Derridae; it’s a warning of a song, advising the listener to resist the charms of a woman who only brings heartbreak, and though its tale is compelling, it’s the sweet dovetailing of the two voices that makes it something special. Mina Tindle – Je Sais Not technically Americana, perhaps – Mina Tindle is the recording name of Parisian Pauline de Lassus – but you can feel the western influence on her stunning second album, due for release next week. They’re subtle inflections, nods to her musical past and her peers rather than anything brash or overblown – in her non-Tindle guise, De Lassus contributed vocals to the National’s fourth album, Boxer, and the band’s Bryce Dessner has arranged a couple of tracks on this record. Je Sais makes the perfect introduction: there’s a beguiling mingling of French and English, a sense of musical adventure, but above all it’s a track that reveals the exceptional beauty of her voice – one moment charged with the iridescence of Elizabeth Fraser, the next settling to a dusky shade. |