JOAN SHELLEY The Spur NO QUARTER
“Hear the child arriving/Heaving heart’s first cry”
JULY 2022
TAKE 302
1 WILCO (P22)
2 ANGEL OLSEN (P28)
3 DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS (P32)
4 CURRENT 93 (P35)
EALBUM OF THE MONTH 9/10
ARLIER this year, speaking to Uncut about her love of Nick Drake, Joan Shelley expressed a preference for “the more intimate recordings, that strippeddownness. When somebody is that good at being the whole band, I want to be as close to the guitar as possible. It has certainly had an influence on my own record making.”
The heart of Shelley’s music since her 2015 breakthrough, Over And Even, is located in the warm, unshowy, close-mic’d interplay between voice and acoustic guitar. So compelling is that sound, any additional textures can feel like minute calibrations, delicate but inessential brushstrokes. Yet like all good minimalists, Shelley recognises the value of the sharp, subversive intervention. Though her music is cool and calm at the centre, a continuous and compelling tension tugs away at the edges.
“I always want there to be a landscape in my music,” Shelley tells some months later. “It’s not overly done, but I want to be haunted by some weird thing. I think of it as a tiny orchestra, the ghost of Frank Sinatra’s studio band. A little swell.” It’s this shimmering luminosity, this , that makes Shelley the most modern of traditionalists. Without it, her songs would still be beautiful. With it, they become
