THE DELINES

WHEN Willy Vlautin told Amy Boone about his new batch of songs set on the Gulf Coast, the singer wasn’t quite sure whether he was referring to The Delines’ next record or a screenplay in progress. Her confusion is understandable: when he was at the helm of Richmond Fontaine, Vlautin wrote strong, deceptively simple narratives about the lonely and dislocated, the dispossessed and the perennially let-down, and he carried this literary style over into The Delines. There he developed richer, more soulful songs with Boone’s knockout voice in mind – equal parts Bobbie Gentry and Chrissie Hynde, it became the carrier of his songs’ blue-collar melancholy.

is the band’s third and several Richmond Fontaine records before that, it occupies a specific geographical location. Boone lived in Austin for years and it seems that when the pair got to discussing their shared love of Texas and the Gulf Coast in the run up to the record, they talked about Tony Joe White too. Boone asked the guitarist to write her a “Rainy Night In Georgia” and so represents him trying to do just that. Clearly, it’s much more than a shot at imitation across a full album: here are 11 songs of a romantic, Southern country-soul bent, as economical and well-judged in arrangements and execution as they are in their lyrical content, which is both painfully poignant and utterly unsentimental. Vlautin describes the record as “cinematic” and it’s hard to disagree, but it’s also small, in the best sense of the word – a series of intimate vignettes, rather than panoramic vistas. The band, which includes RF veterans Sean Oldham (drums) and Freddy Trujillo (bass), with defining keys and trumpet work from Cory Gray, play with warm, melodious restraint, though there’s grain and ache along with their languid swing.