The Delines and Chris Eckman live at Club Uncut: tender, literary tales of underdog America

“Without Uncut, we probably wouldn’t be here,” Willy Vlautin tells the loyal congregation packing the pews for The Delines’ show at Islington’s Union Chapel, part of a rising trajectory which will see them play the prestigious Barbican next year. The love is fully reciprocated at the long-awaited return of Club Uncut, which we hope will allow you to see many of the artists we regularly champion in the flesh.

The Delines stand with Vlautin’s previous outfit Richmond Fontaine at the heart of Uncut’s values, telling tender, literary tales of underdog America, wedded to music in which the tributaries of their country’s music freely flow to find subtle new forms.

Much the same could be said for Chris Eckman, who since his days with ’90s Seattle outliers The Walkabouts has marked out his own parched but indomitable trail, before arriving at last year’s stately landmark The Land We Knew The Best. Stained-glass angels glow orange-red as he stands alone for “Town Lights Fade”, which trusts in seasonal rebirth after stormy times. “And the tears have turned to silver,” he sings, “been minted up as coin.”  

His acoustic guitar murmurs a crystal sigh during “Running Hot”, silvery tension and twang during “Buttercup”. Reckless night odysseys through Oregon sagebrush and squatters’ camps mark “Nothing Left To Hide”. 

“This Curving Life” is, though, tonight’s epic, written during a slow, hard time of pandemic and divorce. “You brought the fire… / You cut my hand, just to keep it lit,” he sings of an incinerating love. Even his adopted Slovenian home’s monumental mountains and valleys come unmoored here, as he wanders forgotten, figuring just to “play some half-baked songs at the county fair”. He closes with The Walkabouts’ “My Diviner”. “Nobody ever said this was going to be easy,” he knew then, finding refreshing wellsprings anyway over his guitar’s soft pulse.

“I feel all the good vibes here – I feel really good,” Amy Boone says early in The Delines’ set, and the camaraderie of a band who have found something precious together is tangible. When this UK tour is done, Boone divulges later, they will record their sixth album here, with three of its songs previewed tonight. Vlautin, who grew up in the gambling town of Reno, is letting their hot streak run. 

Where Richmond Fontaine seemed progressively overtaken by his parallel, heartbreaking novels, losing their fuzzed-up Replacements side in service to his words, Boone provides full-blooded soul and the innate resilience of a woman who recovered from a shattering injury to stand here and sing, redemptive power redoubled live. In many ways, this is her band. 

Vlautin mostly writes about women now, and for Boone’s character more than his own bruised, gun-shy nature. You can hear echoes of his own prose and late Cormac McCarthy, the country-soul of Bobbie Gentry or Dan Penn, but also the urbanity of Bacharach and David. “Drowning In Plain Sight”, for instance, whose working woman finds “the gas gauge is on empty, but I ain’t ever stopped driving”, strength further ennobled here by Cory Gray’s trumpet solo, or “Old Haunted Place”, a prison to which Boone insists, “I ain’t going back”, marching on like Aretha at her most assertive.

The first song Vlautin wrote for Boone, “The Oil Rigs At Night”, set out a fresh American landscape for his low-life songs in flaming Gulf Coast refineries. The Delines’ expanding variety is shown by the new “A Girl Floating On The River”. Cory Gray’s icy keyboard notes conjure numbed ’60s pop, reflecting the state of mind of a woman who appears anaesthetised. Another new song, “Holding Fast”, describes an implacable love almost like a threat, while “He Don’t Burn For Me” settles into romance’s slow, hard fade, taken by Boone as a waking, dead-of-night soliloquy.

“She didn’t have it easy/ But I guess whoever has?” Boone asks in “The Reckless Life”, an especially harsh account of depravity and betrayal. “Oh, once again he has done himself in… / Disappearing his way through town,” she notes in “Walking With His Sleeves Down”, a slow, sad duet with Vlautin spectrally distant, like a transmission from the other side, and Trujillo’s harmonica piercing or perhaps sharpening the gloom. 

“The guys don’t think she’ll make it / But I know inside she still has enough,” Boone insists on the closing “Dilaudid Diane”. She has let hope into Vlautin’s world.

The next Club Uncut show features Joana Serrat, Chris Eckman and Tenderness playing in The Blue Basement at Third Man Records, Soho, on April 17 – get your tickets here