David Kauffman – Kiss Another Day Goodbye
One of my favourite albums of the year is Songs from Suicide Bridge, a re-release on Light in the Attic, named after a photograph of songwriters Eric Caboor and David Kauffman, taken on the Colorado Street Bridge that connects Pasadena to Los Angeles. The pair met playing the coffee shops of LA and teamed up – not as a duo exactly, but as “two loners who happened to join forces”. That loneliness is what threads through this collection of songs, rehearsed in Caboor’s shed, home-recorded on a four-track, and self-released in 1984. It was, at that time, completely out of step with what record executives were seeking: a deliberately miserable folk-rocked two fingers to the music industry. And yet heard today, these songs remain absolute classics. This track is the stand-out for me: a slow drift of a song, aimless and desperate and sad. It captures precisely the moment when the California dream turns, and the land looks lonely and parched.
Sharon Van Etten – Remembering Mountains
Even by the standards of the Greenwich Village folk scene, Karen Dalton was a very particular figure – a singer and guitarist from Enid, Oklahoma, she came to New York to sing in the coffee shops, revealing a voice so sourly beautiful it’s sometimes almost hard to hear. She was Dylan’s favourite singer, yet for many years she stood forgotten, lived rough and in 1993 died in upstate New York. Only a handful of her recordings exist, and none of the songs she set down were her own – indeed for many years it was thought she never wrote her own lyrics at all. But some while back, Dalton’s estate offered a bundle of her lost lyrics to the Tompkins Square label, and the resulting collection, Remembering Mountains: Unheard Songs by Karen Dalton, features stunning interpretations of her songs by artists including Lucinda Williams, Marissa Nadler and Patty Griffin. This beauty by Sharon Van Etten is perhaps my favourite. Van Etten’s voice is a very different instrument to Dalton’s, but it carries a similar cling and sorrow. Apparently there are some 15 more unrecorded Dalton songs in the vault, so the promise of a volume two seems likely.
Reichenbach Falls – English Rose
Reichenbach Falls are a duo from Oxford (their number occasionally bolstered by other members) and while many of the tracks on their debut Reports of Snow called to mind Grant Lee Buffalo or the Felice Brothers, this track has a sort of upland quality. Vaguely Belle and Sebastian in its gait, it’s brighter, more shimmering, and more fitting for this British summer that is surely going to arrive any minute.
J Fernandez – Between the Channels
I’m very much enjoying the return to fuzzed-up bedroom recording of recent times, and the latest example is this offering from the mildly mysterious J Fernandez (actually his name is Justin, and the rumour is he’s a cartographer). Using largely borrowed analogue equipment and recorded in, yes, his Chicago bedroom, his album Many Levels of Laughter was released this week. It’s a brilliant mix of influences: faintly delirious jazz, psych, loops and shades of Jim O’Rourke. This track is its opener, and somehow marries a slightly krautrock glower to something that sounds more iridescently west coast. It’s intriguing and compelling and very moreish.
Meilyr Jones – Refugees
This isn’t really Americana, but it is my favourite song of the year, so I’m sneaking it on to this playlist. Jones is the former frontman of the Welsh band Race Horses, and sometime contributor to Neon Neon’s live shows. This year he will release his debut album, its songs variously inspired by Rome, Berlioz, Byron, 18th-century sculpture, and Eric B and Rakim. This track makes an elegant introduction – it is apparently Jones’s response to watching The Spirit of ’45, Ken Loach’s documentary about the NHS, and reading the passage of Lady Chatterley in which Constance first sees Mellors naked. What that leads to is a song that is tender and radiant and galvanising. “I hear the birds sing back,” Jones sings, exquisite voice over softest piano, “with all the courage that I lack.”
