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Mr Luck and Ms Doom, the fifth album by Portland-based country-soul band The Delines, demonstrates a mastery of big lounge ballads and further proves why Willy Vlautin is rightly considered one of America’s greatest songwriters and novelists.
The title track on The Delines’ new album – Mr Luck and Miss Doom – has its roots in Willy Vlautin’s novel, The Horse, his justly celebrated latest book about an ageing musician, Al Ward, a reclusive character hiding out in a disused mining claim in the high desert of Nevada whose circumstances seems to mirror a half-blind horse that appears outside his retreat one day. An earlier episode from his life as a touring musician recalls Al waking one morning in the Shady Court Motel to write a song called Mr Luck and Ms Doom. In the real world, Vlautin wrote the song following a conversation with the band’s lead singer, Amy Boone, after a gig in Dublin when she asked him to write a straight-up love song where no one dies and nothing goes wrong. Either that, she said, or she was going to lose her mind – Vlautin rightly having something of a reputation for writing about ill-fated characters eking out their existences on the fringes of an often brutal and unforgiving modern-day America.
The divide between Vlautin’s song and novel writing has always been gossamer thin as to be almost non-existent, so it’s little wonder that at least one of the 230 odd song titles featured in The Horse should manifest itself as a fully fledged number on the latest record. The signature song which kicks off this, The Delines’ fifth, arguably best, album to date, is probably Vlautin’s most straight-up attempt at a romantic song with a happy ending, so it’s only appropriate that the record should see its release on Valentine’s Day.
One of the two protagonists, Mr Luck – ironically named because he’s unfortunate enough to get a four-year jail sentence for committing his first crime – meets his love match in Ms Doom, a depressive house cleaner. Amy Boone’s beautifully world-weary tone on this song is at least offset by the lyrics, which have a happier outcome than is standard for a Vlautin composition.
But Vlautin’s dalliance with a romantic ballad was clearly only ever going to be a one-time affair. He soon reverts to form for the remainder of this record, his damaged characters trying their best – and invariably failing – against sometimes insuperable odds.
In terms of its sound, this Delines release follows a similar template to all of their previous outings – the band’s signature template of noirish country soul, embellished by Cory Gray’s expert arrangements and trumpet playing soaring like a bird over the whole ensemble – even if it varies slightly from its predecessor, The Sea Drift, which had a greater sense of place, the story songs on that record rooted in the Gulf Coast.
Her Ponyboy follows Mr Luck and Ms Doom; the song is a literary nod to the novel with the same title by S.E. Hinton. It follows the fortunes of a reckless young couple, madly in love, roaming aimlessly across the United States. But there’s always a price to be paid for such fecklessness, the woman’s lover being an eventual victim of the needle and the damage done. At the end of the song, there’s a particularly poignant moment with our ageing protagonist looking at an old photo of the couple at their youthful best and reflecting perhaps on what might have been.
The band turn things up a notch, and come out swinging, for Left Hook Like Frazier. It’s The Delines at their grooviest best, Cory Gray’s trumpet and keyboards providing a soaring melody, allied to Amy Boone’s note-perfect phrasing and the pulse of Freddy Trujillo’s bass – its lively, repeated refrain of “that’s how you break a broken heart”, completely belying its somewhat grim subject matter of a woman who’s a repeat victim of domestic violence.
It’s back to a more stately pace for the languid, late-night cocktail lounge feel of Sittin’ On The Curb, its female lead character sitting on the sidewalk “watching our house burn down, windows exploding and the flames bringing it all to the ground”. A metaphor for a relationship that’s gone up in flames because of a husband’s infidelity (“What does she have that I don’t have? And why would you hurt me?”), it nevertheless can’t help but bring to mind the recent tragedy of the California wildfires.
There’s Nothing Down The Highway is even bleaker yet. As spare in its delivery as possible, it’s a masterclass in minimalism, with just a haunting piano accompaniment for the most part. It is a story song about a woman who has metaphorically split herself in two – between the person in her imagination heading off to sunnier vistas – while in real life, she’s condemned to a life of drudgery. A distant, understated trumpet comes in towards the song’s end, only adding to the sense of resignation and failure: “There’s nothing down the highway but the darkness of the road”.
Don’t Miss Your Bus Lorraine is a whole novel written in a twenty-line song. Lorraine, a woman recently released from prison on marijuana convictions, comes back to a state in which the drug is now legalised. A former convicted felon now condemned to dead-end jobs working as a maid, catching a bus in the song is the narrowest of small victories for Lorraine in a system gamed at keeping the poorest in low-paid employment and debt peonage (“A felon ain’t supposed to make it”.) Again, the expert use of brass by Cory Gray here elevates what would otherwise be a profoundly sad song, the supreme irony for Lorraine being that “now there’s weed stores on every street, even the old ladies and Christians now believe”.
The Haunting Thoughts, which highlights Vlautin’s facility for immersive lyrics, is a song about a woman crippled by anxiety who can’t shake the fear that the world she inhabits is about to collapse (“like I’m circling a drain”), with drug victims on the corner of every street and a world full of “a million and one tragedies”. This song has Amy Boone demonstrating her capacity to fully inhabit Vlautin’s characters, putting in one of her best vocal performances to date, with its piano accompaniment providing just the right note of atmospheric dread.
Better outcomes are perhaps anticipated for the female characters in the last three numbers. First off, Nancy, in the Bobbie Gentry-influenced Nancy and The Pensacola Pimp, is a teenager, aged 16, trapped by her pimp who has her under his thumb, although she eventually manages to exact her revenge. It has a simple, infectious guitar figure, while the metronomic rim shots of drummer Sean Oldham, maintained throughout, add to the song’s sense of tension. In the jaunty, Maureen’s Gone Missing, a woman robs a drug operation and manages to skip town, while the female in JP & Me has the protagonist grifter making off from a Motel 6 in Yuma with the proceeds of what you assume is their ill-gotten gains.
The album fades out on the mournful strains of a one-minute and 37-second track titled Don’t Go Into That House Lorraine. Are we to presume it’s the same character we’ve met previously in the album who’s keen to avoid missing her bus? There’s a real ambiguity about what fate awaits Lorraine here, but perhaps that’s for the best. Vlautin has always had a natural affinity for writing from the perspective of his female characters, and in Mr Luck and Ms Doom, he’s probably reached his apogee. Being a great lover of Raymond Carver’s stories, one might assume that he’s also drawn to the sometimes deliberately ambiguous outcomes of many of that author’s stories.
Vlautin has demonstrated once again a mastery of the big, low-key lounge ballads on this record and also managed to evoke the sense and sound of some of his favourite soul/country/pop records of the 1970s and 80s. The record also provides a powerful reminder of how Cory Gray’s trumpet playing can evoke the loneliest of late-night feelings.
Throughout this extraordinary record, the cinematic and visual feel for the stories that Willy Vlautin weaves on Mr Luck and Ms Doom finds an equal match in John Morgan Askew’s terrific production values. Vlautin could always inhabit his songs’ characters and make the listener care for them. Of course, this wouldn’t work nearly so well if the arrangements themselves weren’t so good.
Vlautin clearly cares deeply about the subjects of his songs. As the tent cities in the underpasses of his home city, Portland, continue to multiply, and the problems resulting from drug use, addiction and crime proliferate, you have to wonder at the future for these characters and figure that it’s hard to be optimistic for most of them. But at least two – Mr Luck and Ms Doom – seem to have something of a happy ending.
Mr. Luck And Ms. Doom (14th February 2025) Decor Records
Bandcamp: https://thedelines.bandcamp.com/album/mr-luck-and-ms-doom
