Holly Golightly & The Brokeoffs - 'You Can't Buy A Gun When You're Crying' (Damaged Goods) Released 02/04/07

Uncork the moonshine and reach for the fiddle. Holly Golightly is back with a platter that treks deep into the Appalacchians, as opposed to the Chigaco juke joints that have provided many of the templates for the London-based rhythm & blues revivalist's ample output in the past.

Musically, the album's so backwards-gazing you'd think Golightly & new duet partner Lawyer Dave have hopped back in time to some distant sepia-tinged bluegrass jamboree in search of inspiration. From sparse country ballads to lowkey lovelorn blues moans, we're in a territory where there's only enough electricity for one microphone, around which the musicians congregate, stepping forth whenever it's time for a spot of picking. The subject matter's equally preoccupied with traditional concerns. Heartbreak, longing, firearms, Jesus and the devil - it's all here, in one squirrel-shooting, thigh-slapping, moonshine-sipping blast of arcane hillbilly hoedown.

As such, you'd expect 'You Can't Buy A Gun When You're Crying' - handy bit of trivia, that - to emit the odious whiff of pastiche, with nothing to offer beyond pointless reworkings of vintage formulas. Instead, Golightly and her Brokeoffs companions inhabit these timeworn, oft-visited sounds with the natural ease, disarming charm and undisputable authenticity of a, say, Gillian Welch, with a healthy dollop of Tom Waitsian racket-eering. The stripped-down junkyard ramalama of opener 'Devil Do', for example, inhales the country-blues-boogie format via a percussion-heavy Waits filter, landing with a clattering, swaying thud that's simultaneously as down-to-earth as a dirt-caked mule and as otherworldly as an UFO circling over the hill country.     

After such an imaginative start, it's a bit disappointing to discover the rest of the platter reverting to strictly old-timey stylings that could've been committed to tape at any point during the last sixty years (or even earlier in the case of the lo-fi 'I Let My Daddy Do That', which hisses and crackles like a 1920's blues 78). Dependence on elemental building blocks, however, hardly matters as long as Goligthly and co. can put forward tunes of the calibre of the blue-tinged ballad 'Black Heart' and the gospel-hued 'Jesus Don't Love Me', harmony manna marinated in equal amounts of heartbreak and defiance. At a time when most acts are busy cruising down the smooth stadium-bound highway, 'You Can't Buy A Gun When You're Crying' opts for a pothole-filled dirt road that leads to an all-night dance at a battered old barn. Relying on a few sparsely plucked chords and a sweet melody when so many pile on layers of stifling polish surely deserves a round of applause.