The Delines – The Sea Drift
Decor (DECOR58CD) – 11 February 2022
While it’s only two years since The Delines released The Imperial, this is the first new material recorded by Willy Vlautin and Amy Boone since the 2016 car crash that hospitalised her for over a year and led to a lengthy period of recovery. The Sea Drift features regulars Cory Gray on keyboards and trumpet, bassist Freddy Trujillo, and jazz drummer Sean Oldham. Alongside the core band are musical contributions from Kyleen and Patti King on violin, cellist Collin Oldham and saxman Noah Bernstein. The album is set on the Gulf Coast, and, as you’d expect from Vlautin, a highly regarded successful novelist, it weaves a series of short stories around the various characters that populate the narratives. It opens with the languid Tony Joe White wee hours soulfulness of Little Earl, Gray’s horn and string arrangements imbuing a cinematic tone as Boone recounts the tale of two brothers, one wounded, fleeing a mini-mart outside of Port Arthur, Texas, after a failed shoplifting. Vlautin’s eye for detail is captured in lines like “Earl is driving down the Gulf Coast/Sitting on a pillow so he can see the road/New to him is twelve pack of beer/Three frozen pizzas and two lighters as souvenirs… He’s looking for a hospital even though his brother don’t want him to/He’s starting to panic he’s too scared to stop/He’s never driven at night and he keeps getting lost”.
Taking the tempo up a notch with an acoustic strum foundation and a 60s French pop feel, Kid Codeine was apparently inspired by meeting a middle-aged bartender with a big bouffant in downtown LA, in the song transformed into the girlfriend of a boxer, running a lounge in Lombard Street, in San Francisco and earning her nickname “‘Cause nothing ever makes her mad she’s always cool and easy… heard just buying milk she wears a full length fakе fur coat”.
Slowing back down to a late-night piano blues groove with a warm brass kiss, Drowning in Plain Sight has a lonely, middle-aged woman driving aimlessly around Galveston, feeling unloved and unable to go home to her family (“The phone starts ringing an hour after I should have been home/I see cargo ships passing the gas gauge is on empty but I don’t stop driving/‘Cause the second I do I swear I’ll lose my mind/If only for a moment, just one time/I had love that would hold me and get me through the night/I’d be okay if just for a minute”).
A car remains the setting for the exhausted All Along The Ride, a barely-there, ruminative keyboards arrangement backdropping Boone as she details a couple whose relationship is falling apart as they drive along the Texas coast back from Seadrift, she saying nothing but knowing their journey is coming to an end (“All along the ride I wasn’t talking but you knew why/But like the Primadonna when it was around /No one ever thought one day it would burn to the ground”).
A short piano and trumpet noodling instrumental, Lynett’s Lament, provides a bridge into Hold Me Slow, a jazzy early hours slow soul groove with Boone adopting the persona of a woman feeling her romantic life’s about to change (“Open up a bottle and I’ll close the shades/Put on something that sways and/Kiss my neck that way”) after having “been so tired and alone” but still needing reassurance that “it’s not a fleeting thing”.
Vlautin offers another striking vignette, a snatch of a longer narrative that leaves you wanting to know more, with the sparsely fingerpicked and brass haunted blues Surfers In Twilight, Boone half-speaking the story of a woman getting off work, walking down the street of the seaside town to see her man when “Patrol cars stop, police rush out, Throw my man against a wall”. She has no idea why, but “From the back of their car he glances at me and I can tell whatever they think he’s done, he’s guilty”.
The musical tone is equally spare for Past The Shadows with its lazing rhythm, steady drumbeat, brass, and electric guitar stabs complementing Boone’s late-night, hushed bluesy vocals. Still, the mood is less bleak as she sings, “When all you can see is you and me in the darkness/When the normal people have all cleared/That’s when I feel safe, when I feel safe/Let’s disappear past the shadows/Where only the damaged stay/Let’s disappear past the shadows/We’ll never have to be like them again”.
The horns again set the ambience for This Ain’t No Getaway, the storytelling returning to a dramatic note, unfolding at 6 o’clock in the morning (“Sun’s coming through the shades/The stereo’s too loud but/The neighbors are scared to complain”) as the narrator returns to her ex-boyfriend’s house to collect her belongings, Vlautin’s novelist sensibilities again observing the telling details that hint at where this might be heading (“There a half pack of Winstons and an overfilled ashtray/A pint of V.O. that’s nearly put away/And sitting on the TV is a loaded .38/He lights a cigarette and says nothing/Just stares out into space”).
The final song is also the most romantic, Saved From The Sea, echoing the measured soulful vibe and hope of Hold Me Slow as, to the minimal piano notes, resonator guitar, hummed oohing backing vocals and finger clicks, Boone purrs, “He makes me feel like the world ain’t sinking/Like the world ain’t as ugly and cruel as it is/He makes me feel like my life ain’t been wasted/Like my life ain’t just slipping away”. It ends with a second keys and Chet Baker-like trumpet instrumental, The Gulf Drift Lament, evoking night rain washed neon streets like some L.A. noir soundtrack before it fades into the shadows.
A stunning return by Amy Boone, who exudes assurance and bruised sensuality alongside evocative lyrics from Willy Vlautin and a consummately crafted soundscape. The Sea Drift is an intoxicating piece of work from The Delines; if it were a film, Fritz Lang would have been the director.
Note: The CD also features five bonus tracks: I Always Meant To Go Back Home, Little Earl (string version), All Along The Ride (piano only), Lately I’ve Been Going Down and Myrna & McCaughey.
The Delines are on their UK and European Tour now.
More here: https://www.thedelines.com/
Photo Credit: Jason Quigley
Order it here: https://pocp.co/the-sea-drift.opr