The Delines - Colfax

The brainchild of Richmond Fontaine singer and novelist Willy Vlautin, The Delines is essentially an alt-country indie supergroup. Fronted by vocalist Amy Boone of The Damnations TX, the band also features keyboardist Jenny Conlee (The Decemberists), pedal steel player Tucker Jackson (Minus 5) and Fontaine’s Sean Oldham and Vlautin.

The seeds for Colfax were sown in 2012 when Vlautin, so beguiled by Boone’s heartbreakingly longing, yet resilient voice, wrote an album’s worth of songs and assembled a band around her. Recorded at Flora Recording and produced with John Askew (Dodos, Alela Diane) in Portland, Oregon, these 11 tracks tell haunting, modern stories through the musical lens of soul and roots music of decades past.

The characters populating the songs – blue collar drinkers, luckless lovers, minimum wage slaves, PTSD-suffering soldiers – could have walked right off the pages of one of Vlautin’s bittersweet novels. The title track is about a worried woman out searching the late night streets for her troubled and troublemaking veteran brother: “He wasn’t like this before he left/ Now he comes back and his mind’s a wreck/ and the army, what do they do?”

The party-loving counter girl in ‘I Won’t Slip Up’ has her own problems: “45 hours a week my boss double checks me/ He counts the till in front of everyone before I leave.” Heartbreakingly fucked up lullaby ‘Sandman’s Coming’ sums the album’s ethos up: “It’s a great big dirty world/ If they say it ain’t, they’re lying.”

Best listened to late at night, Colfax is a stunningly timeless and intimate collection of songs that whisper to you like a world weary drunk at some sleazy dive bar, offloading their problems, confessing their secrets and recounting their tales of poverty, heartbreak and woe. It’s a truly gorgeous piece of work. Here’s hoping The Delines make another one.