The Delines: Lantern Hall, Bristol Beacon

The Delines
Lantern Hall, Bristol
1st April 2025

Tales of the underside don’t come better than this, writes Elfyn Griffith. 

Stories of lowlife, hardlife, northwest US; drugs, crime, addiction, domestic abuse, poverty and broken love amid the detritus and the humdrum. Oregon’s The Delines capture it all with a mesmerising deftness and subtlety of touch that leaves the listener breathless at times.

It may not sound like a bag of laughs but who needs mirth to get euphoric and emotional, wistful and contemplative…through their half dozen albums over their 11-year existence they’ve coloured that American soundtrack to the downtrodden in their own unique way.

Formed by singer/songwriter Willy Vlautin after he left alt-country band Richmond Fontaine (also from Portland, Oregon) and singer Amy Boone, The Delines still inhabit and have continued Richmond’s beautifully delineated stories from the underbelly of the beast that is America.

With Vlautin’s novelic songwriting and Boone’s remarkable narrative vocals – which seem to  inhabit and get to the core of the songs’ characters – the music is a languid country soul with a haunting, gritty beauty of its own.

Tonight’s mature audience are treated to that journey down the backroads and into the bars, motels and homelife hells, carried along on a mariachi breeze by the trumpet of Cory Gray – while still playing the keyboards with one hand –  as Boone denotes the tales with her careworn caress of a voice. Vlautin’s guitar, Freddy Trujillo’s bass and Sean Oldham’s brushed drums (the three originals from R. Fontaine) complete the sultry southern soulfulness of their sound.

A big chunk of tonight’s set is drawn from their new 2025 album, Mr Luck & Ms Doom – opening with that title track – and others from along their journey; indeed their last album, the equally majestic The Sea Drift, including the sublime favourite Little Earl and a stunningly evocative Surfers In Twilight. Stories of a heist gone wrong and a domestic arrest at a resort, they are the very essence of what The Delines are about: the tragic cinematic intensity and wounded reflections of working class America drifting along in their deep-blue addictive grooves.

Nancy and The Pensacola Pimp (I mean, what a title…) has a darkly rhythmic, slightly threatening, beauty. JP & Me, that sad trademark spell. Left Hook Like Frazier, a soulful danciness. My Blood Bleeds The Darkest Blue, a Good The Bad & The Ugly mariachi vibe.

“When we formed the band we picked up Amy on the side of the road making pancakes,” observes Vlautin in one of the many between-song banters. Apparently she makes great blueberry ones. Boone remembers “…Bristol as being a crazy town”. The dialogue is warm and humorous, maybe in contrast to the gravity of the song’s contents, which also have their own dark humour in spite of, and alongside, their tragedies and despair.

The set builds into an ecstatically lugubrious finale with Don’t Think Less Of Me, from the 2023 soundtrack to Vlautin’s book (he is a novelist with half a dozen titles under his belt) before the musicians return for an encore beginning with the smokey jazz of Lynette’s Lament. Boone joins them for Calling In (with it’s ‘darkness ain’t such a hard road’ refrain), the only track tonight from their seminal debut 2014 LP Colfax Avenue, and the exhilarating emotional charge of The Imperial, from 2019’s album of the same name.

The doo-wop acapella territory of Dialudid Diane, with only Cory Gray providing a soft trumpet backing, the others swooning in style, ends another special night from this truly exceptional outfit.

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The Delines can be found at their website| Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

Words by Elfyn Griffith. Elfyn tweets here

Photo provided by Chris Metzler