What with falling off stages left and acquiring ear infections right, Ryan Adams could be doing with an understudy. Step forward Steven and Sherilyn Collins, two for the price of one husband and wife duo from Texas, and ten dusty tracks of coasting-on-the-breeze sunset soundtracking beauty. It’s music very much rooted in the formalities of the genre, strings played almost as if they didn’t want to disturb them, a touch of the twinkling old Joanna, slide guitar to these songs as water is to life and hangovers, monologues imparted like a lonely confessional over a musky bar counter, or imparting secrets to the moon from somewhere in deserted back porch America. But there is an entwined understanding on this record amongst its many parts, and therefore you’d assume between its wedded protagonists, that transcends the influences and regularity and shifts the gravity back towards them.
There is something in the way their voices become one, drawing deeper comparisons with Joy Zipper than their romantic affiliation alone. They don’t quite sit side by side, it’s as if the two voices working together dissolve, like chocolate flakes introduced gradually to warm milk. ‘Brother’ is an especially fine example of this, almost a capella save for an atmospheric hum and a slide guitar interlude like watching shooting stars, Sherilyn’s voice sealing off and flavouring Steven’s more insistent and upfront tones. The vocal work in general, although 50% more abrasive, reminds of the gentle unassuming majesty of Mazzy Star (not least on the Sherilyn led ‘Slow Dance’), never pushing unduly hard but knowing that’s all it takes.
‘Absalom! Absalom!’ is a fantastic sailing pop tune, carried by a bed of shimmering Hammond organ, halfway between Ryan Adams and Tom Petty, a standard upheld on ‘The Monsters of Goya’, albeit with the foot off the gas. There is more than one gear here too, with ‘Won’t Be Long’ and ‘Sad Ole Geronimo’ being shades darker and certainly more looming, and the latter with its fidgety, distorted guitar strokes and pattering drums, sitting somewhere between Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and Woody Guthrie in the haunting dead of night. A truly special, traditionally faithful, alternative country album, fashioned by individuals. Though they work so well together you could count them as one.