The Delines 
Mr Luck and Ms Doom 
(Decor) 
HHHHI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_4Yf_b40lg 

THE spark for the new record from Portland five-piece The Delines was singer Amy Boone turning to songwriter and guitarist Willy Vlautin and saying: “You have to write me a straight-up love song where no-one dies and nothing goes wrong or I’m going to lose my mind.” 

Vlautin, also a celebrated novelist, duly wrote the album’s title track about a hopeful relationship between a man just out of prison and a woman who cleans houses in Florida and is “half living in her car.”  

This being Vlautin, though, the happily-ever-after vibes don’t last long, with the rest of the set populated with drifters and misfits on the losing end of the American Dream. 

Chock-full of melancholic short story songs, classic-sounding vocals from Boone and the band’s sumptuous country soul, it’s another triumph from The Delines. 
 
 
Jim Ghedi 
Wasteland 
(Basin Rock) 
HHHHH

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3F6I8ylajKQ 

I DIDN’T think Jim Ghedi could top his astonishing 2021 album In The Furrows Of Common Place. 

Turns out I was wrong.  

With Wasteland the Sheffield-based singer-songwriter significantly ups the ante, fashioning an intense and brooding set of folk music, albeit powered by electric guitar, synths and muscular strings. 

“There’s violence on these hills,” he sings on the absolutely colossal title track. 

Elsewhere there is a seething version of Harry Cox’s What Will Become Of England, with the evergreen lines: “Some have money plenty but still they crave for more / They will not lend a hand to help the starving poor.” 

Seeming to embody this nation’s long history of internal conflict and working-class resistance — I’m thinking Captain Swing, the Chartists and the enclosure of common land — Wasteland is exactly where British folk music should be today. 

A masterwork.  

Nap Eyes 
The Neon Gate 
(Paradise of Bachelors) 
HHHHI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GS3LvAkE-LQ 

THE fifth longplayer from Nap Eyes came out in November but it’s so good I thought it was incumbent on me to tell Morning Star readers about it even if my review is four months late. 

Hailing from Nova Scotia, Canada, the band play lo-fi, laid back guitar music, overlaid with frontman Nigel Chapman’s talk singing.  

Think Lou Reed if he was part of the early ’90s US indie scene with David Berman and Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus. I must have listened to the hooky Tangent Resolve over 50 times already.  

The Neon Gate adds an interesting ingredient to the already engaging mix — two songs sourced from the work of poets. The lyrics to Demons are a poem by Alexander Pushkin, while the wonderful I See Phantoms is based on the words of WB Yeats. 

A gem of a record.