The Delines

Venue:

The Arts Club, Liverpool

Date: 06/05/2022

The Delines make music that is low-key, quiet and dark. It’s liminal music – songs on the border where day meets night; land meets sea; where you can fall on the right side or the wrong side of the tracks. Take Little Earl, the opening song on the new album The Sea Drift, and of this concert. Earl is driving, propped up on a pillow, the first time he has done so after dark. His brother is bleeding in the back. We aren’t told but we presume it’s after a botched store robbery – in the passenger seat he has ‘a twelve pack of beer, three frozen pizzas and two lighters as souvenirs’. He’s panicking, looking for a hospital, getting lost. And that’s where we leave them, forever caught in this awful life-changing, maybe life-ending, moment. Willy Vlautin’s beautifully crafted songs give us scenes from a film noir, or moments in a short story by John Steinbeck or Alice Munro.

Songs like this, as performed by The Delines, are quietly devastating, and the sticky floor, standing venue that is The Arts Club maybe isn’t the best place for them. Not least because most of us are at the age where we could really do with a comfy chair and a cup of tea rather than the overpriced lager on sale at the noisy bar at the back. But notwithstanding this, the band convey the songs as convincingly as they do on record, Amy Boone’s pure and understated vocals slightly lower in the mix than on record but no less compelling.

Most of the set consists of songs from The Sea Drift which they perform almost in its entirety. There are two brand new songs, one of which they tell us is getting its first ever public outing. And there are a handful of songs from the first two albums. I’d have liked a few more from Colfax, but we get the magnificent Oil Rigs at Night, surely their greatest song. It’s narrated by a woman resolving, more in sorrow than in anger (‘I’m not saying he’s not a good man, I’m just so tired of living my life a lie’) to leave her husband as he is out working on the rigs. It’s melancholic, and moving, and Bruce Springsteen and Gretchen Peters would be proud to have written it – and it’s beautifully delivered by Boone and the band.

They’re not a band with a huge range. The template of the songs is pretty consistent. The pace and the mood are the same through out. Quiet, mainly rhythm, guitar from Vlautin, supported by Sean Oldham and Freddy Trujillo on drums and bass respectively, and with most of the musical colour coming from Cory Gray’s electric keyboard, and, as he plays keyboard chords with his left hand, mournful, sweet trumpet played with his right hand. And of course Boone’s voice acting as story teller in both the words and the poignancy with which she sings. But what they do, they do spectacularly well. And the mood is leavened with surprisingly chirpy banter between the songs, as they joke about the nautical nature of the new record and suggest they should be wearing yachting caps and sweaters, or as Boone considers the request from some audience members to do a Beatles song, whilst some others strongly demur (this is a regular phenomenon when American bands play Liverpool). Wisely, they decide it wouldn’t be a good idea, and plough on with their own material. And when it’s as good as this, I should damn well think so.

The audience:

Mainly blokes in their fifties and sixties. And surprisingly thin on the ground. There were maybe 200-250 in the room. It’s still tough out there.

It made me think..

When in the hands of a master like Vlautin, the 4 minute song really is a perfect medium for capturing moments that tell of a bigger truth, just as the short story can do. And, God, it’s good to be out hearing live music again

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