Like covers albums, duets can be risky affairs. There are, of course, those who pioneered the genre, making transcendent records with their other halves during the 1960s and ‘70s (come on down Johnny and June, George and Tammy and Jane and Serge) but while the genre is still capable of pleasant surprises in contemporary times (Mark Lanegan and Isobel Campbell), there are plenty of other unlikely pairings (Celine Dion and, er, R. Kelly) that are enough to make the Dalai Lama gag.
Thankfully, Michael Weston King and his better half Lou Dalgleish fit very snugly within the ‘transcendent’ category. Together they are MY DARLING CLEMENTINE and their ‘How Do You Plead?’ really is a classic Nashville-style duets album - even if it was recorded in Chalk Farm instead of Bradley’s Barn.
Individually, this couple have made creative waves for some years. Having previously worked with Elvis Costello and Brian Kennedy, not to mention releasing four acclaimed solo albums, Lou Dalgleish comes with an impressive reputation. Seasoned MWK fans, meanwhile, have been spoiled by his Roots/ Americana-flavoured releases for years, both with The Good Sons and as a solo artist. In recent years, he’s been upping his personal ante with fantastic studio LPS like ‘A New Kind of Loneliness’ and last year’s fiercely moving ‘I Didn’t Raise My Boy to be a Soldier’, so – while this duets album was long-rumoured – we had plenty to occupy us while it was incubating. However, now it’s finally been conceived ‘How Do You Plead?’ really does sound like the album Michael and Lou were born to make all along. And if all that sounds like a long-winded way of saying it’s a potential career best, well that might just be the case.
Musically, the band Weston King and Dalgleish assembled to bring this to life are an enviable unit. Long-term pedal steel maestro Alan Cook makes like his usual consummate self, while further heavyweights like keyboard player Geraint Watkins (Nick Lowe, Van Morrison), drummer Jim Russell (Scotty Moore) and guitarist Martin Belmont (Graham Parker & The Rumour, Ducks Deluxe) bring along the sort of kudos most aspiring singer/ songwriters would kill significant family members to acquire. Together, they weave the perfect country-tinged tapestry for Weston King and Dalgleish to embroider these hard-hitting songs of love, separation, acrimony and bitterness upon.
Kissed by piano, violin and a measured baritone guitar solo from Belmont, opener ‘By a Thread’ is superficially as graceful as you please, but King’s fatalistic lyric (“into the darkness we will fall away/ there is nothing left to say”) makes is clear that emotions are already on a knife edge. It only gets more turbulent from thereon in, especially on pin drop ballads like ‘Put Your Hair Back’ and the aching, love triangle tragedy ‘The Other Half’, where the band play it with kid gloves and Dalgleish gives it the full-on Patsy Cline treatment. Gorgeous stuff and then some.
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It’s not all tears, excess beer and oblivion, though. Tracks like the strident ‘100,000 Words’, the sturdy, confident groove of ‘Going Back to Memphis’ and the boogie-woogie swing of ‘Goodbye Week’ all have reserves of hope and plenty of swagger, while the low-ridin’, rockabilly-style shuffle of ‘Nothing Left to Say’ favourably recalls Elvis Costello’s landmark ‘King of America ’ LP. On this latter, the final burning embers of love (“call me anytime/ I’ll be waiting with you on my mind”) sputter but refuse to be extinguished for good, whether that’s for better or worse.
Elsewhere, resentment rides high on songs like ultra-bitter ‘You’ve Found Your Man’ (“tonight the room is like an ice box/ I watch your breath collide with mine”) and the lively, Sun Studios-style groove of ‘I Bought Some Roses’, although on this latter the bitching and strutting is wonderfully catty and playful, with Dalgleish and King swapping verses and brilliantly trading insults on the fade. It’s great, though probably outstripped by ‘She is Still My Weakness’: a stunning slice of cosmic country soul aided and abetted by a superb Dalgleish vocal and Belmont’s heartstring-tugging guitar.
The final farewell is, of course, shattering. With support from Watkins’ tremulous piano and a classy, teardrop vibrato figure from Belmont, King and Dalgleish inject a tangible frisson of darkness (“I cannot share you, and she’ll never have you/ I’m betrayed by the man I adore/ One last kiss my darling, you’ll never betray me no more”) to a song which – musically – is consummate Nashville fare, but emotionally is as cold and menacing as an autumn in the Antarctic. To say it’s one hell of a way is something of an understatement.
It’s not too great a leap of faith, then, to suggest My Darling Clementine have recorded an album deserving of a ranking among the great duet albums of our time. Evoking Nashville’s finest, yet laced with hefty dollops of stark contemporary reality, ‘How Do You Plead?’ loves, honours and proceeds to hide the murder weapon.
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