albumreview

There are writers who write novels and happen to make music on the side. And then there is Willy Vlautin, who builds a parallel universe, brick by brick, album by album, book by book, populated by people clinging to the edges of the American dream while that dream itself departed long ago. ‘The Set Up’ is the latest chapter in that universe, and it is darker, quieter and more haunting than anything that came before it.

‘The Set Up’ was born in the shadow of ‘Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom’, from songs written during the same sessions that told a different kind of story. That also explains the short time between the two releases, all the more remarkable given that the band spent much of the intervening period on an extensive tour. Vlautin notes in his liner thoughts that the songs simply did not fit. They were, as he puts it himself, too lonely, too rattled for the drifting romance that defined ‘Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom’. That is also the best way to describe ‘The Set Up’: this is the troubled sister who stayed behind while the romantic couple hit the road.

The album opens with the first part of the three-part spoken-word title suite. Amy Boone narrates calmly and ominously about a couple who set fire to a half-built hotel in Lafayette, pocket eighty grand and leave for Spain. It sounds like someone whispering to you at the start of a late-night film that things are not going to end well. Much has already been said and written about Boone’s voice. Rightly so. She sounds like someone who has seen too much yet somehow retained her humanity, and on this album she carries the stories as though she has lived inside them herself.

‘Can You Get Me Out Of Phoenix?’ is the pivotal track on the record. It follows a grifter’s daughter stranded in Phoenix, reflecting on her father’s life. The soul influences are at their strongest here, the sound of the seventies running through the arrangements, and the melody carries that melancholic openness that defines Vlautin’s finest work. If you want to hear one song to decide whether The Delines are for you, this is it. It combines Springsteen’s storytelling with the sonic world of Emmylou Harris on her darkest evenings.

The instrumental interludes deserve special mention. ‘Jumping Off In Madras’ was written for the character who steps off the freight train alone at the end of ‘Her Ponyboy’, and the trumpet sounds like a mournful siren closing out a long night. ‘Getting Out Of The Ward’ follows a patient leaving the hospital two days after Christmas, with a piano that grows gradually more dramatic. They are brief, but they carry the cinematic weight of the record.

That cinematic quality is no accident. Vlautin, who has seven novels to his name and has seen three of them adapted into films, writes songs like scenes. The characters in ‘The Reckless Life’, ‘Dilaudid Diane’ and ‘Walking With His Sleeves Down’ are casualties of the opioid crisis that has ravaged the United States over the past decades, and Vlautin describes their lives without sentimentality or judgment. That is harder than it sounds.

Producer John Morgan Askew once again builds a sonic world that carries the stories without overwhelming them. Slow-burning horns, sparse piano, a rhythm section that moves like someone who would rather not be noticed. It is a sound that demands attention and rewards those who give it. The album closes with ‘The Last Time I Saw Her’, an instrumental that captures the disorientation of being deceived without needing a single word to do so.

If there is a critical note to be sounded, it is that ‘The Set Up’ does not reveal its best cards immediately. Those expecting immediate melodic hooks may find the album’s middle stretch a little slow. But that is also precisely the logic of the record: it builds a world, and that world takes time to enter.

‘The Set Up’ is not just an album. It is literature in song form, a document of an America that is rarely mapped this honestly. With this record, The Delines deliver one of the strongest albums of their already impressive career.

(8.5/10) (Decor Records / Jealous Butcher Records)